Torgen

Chapter 13 Tarkik and Moon fell into a daily rhythm for the rest of the week. After waking up, Tarkik would wet his diaper if he needed to while Moon got dressed. In the hotel lobby, they met up with Petunia, Colin, Arturo, and a few of the other employees attending the performance improvement summit who were also staying at the Ferreot and walked to the office together. They got breakfast from the office cafe, and since that included coffee it stimulated Tarkik into soiling his diaper, though for the benefit of the rest of the group he did hold that until they were all done eating and dropping off their trays at the dish room. Arturo always rolled his eyes at Moon’s offer of a diaper change, which Tarkik didn’t understand—he hadn’t offered a bottom-cumming, and Tarkik wouldn’t have accepted if he had. They each attended their assigned team’s standup meetings, then returned to the large conference room for a classroom session with Frank and Frank before returning to embed with their teams. Moon technically had some onboarding material to work through, even though he was only going to work there for another week and a half, but he completed it quickly and joined Tarkik and Petunia in their observation, even if he didn’t understand it as well as them due to his lack of experience. They heard no further buzzing from Petunia for the rest of the week. Tarkik wasn’t sure if she had turned her vibrator down lower, if having been caught she had decided to go without it, or if she no longer needed it. A fourth option briefly crossed his mind: Moon had stretched her out to the extent that it would no longer stay in. Regardless, it would not be appropriate for work to ask which it was, the wolves and foxes’ offers and requests for sex acts to accompany their many diaper changes notwithstanding. The group tended to return to the hotel together as well at the end of the day, and Petunia never tried to get alone with Arturo or Colin to make the same request of them as she had made to Tarkik and Moon, though perhaps she had already done it while the two of them were away changing a diaper. One unusual event from Tarkik’s perspective was the sudden addition of a sprint wrap-up meeting to his, Moon’s, and Petunia’s calendars on Thursday afternoon. Apparently the team had already finished every work item that was part of the sprint, so they had a meeting to discuss which of their estimates had been wrong for future planning purposes, plus discussions of the schedule for the operations team enabling the features and any special rollback procedures if something broke. This meant that Friday wasn’t part of a sprint, and was spent on maintenance tasks like code cleanups. This surprised Tarkik, since he was used to sprints being a way of dividing up time, not a thing there could be time between other than every second weekend, but it did make sense that you can’t always be sprinting. Tarkik considered telling the rest of the group that Canine Wonderland existed, but decided against it. They were adults and could do their own research into what activities they could fill their weekend with, and he didn’t intend to turn it into an implicit group outing. It was meant to be something fun for Moon to do with his fox, and Tarkik would hopefully enjoy it too. He did let Atuat know about it when the girls weren’t listening in—not that he needed her permission, and one trip to an amusement park would hardly break their budget, but he didn’t want her to be surprised when the charge showed up on the credit card bill. He did treat it like he was doing research in case they wanted to return some day as a family. Atuat figured that all of them receiving the same treatment Tarkik currently was would hamper their enjoyment any such trip, never mind the difficulty of finding a wolf family of the same composition willing to fulfill the role, and Tarkik didn’t entirely disagree, but as he put it, “think of how good an amusement park would have to be in a country where everyone has sex four times a day.” Early Saturday morning, Moon and Tarkik went to the lobby to have the breakfast buffet at the hotel restaurant, which they charged to the room and therefore to the expense account. While Tarkik’s morning coffee was helping him soil himself, Moon checked the weather on his phone and saw that it would be a warm day—perfect weather for visiting an amusement park, guaranteeing it would be crowded—so instead of using the washrooms in the lobby to change Tarkik’s diaper they returned to the room so Moon could also change himself out of his trousers and into a pair of shorts. Now both dressed for the weather, they went to the subway station paw-in-paw to take the commuter train to the outskirts of the metro area, where Canine Wonderland’s three park complex was. As Moon boosted Tarkik up to the ticket counter to sign the credit card slip, Tarkik had a few concerns about this park. First was the thrillingness: because of the climate, the largest amusement park in Arctica was inside a mall, and it was quite a large mall, but the roller coasters there were small enough to fit inside it. Several of the coasters here were hundreds of feet tall, and one was long enough that part of it stretched outside the park’s exterior fences, with airtime hills forming a tunnel for entering patrons to walk under. He had been fine on the one looping indoor coaster at the mall, but these were a few tiers above that. His second concern was whether the Wolfoxians’ liberal attitude toward sex would be reflected in the design of the park. Would Thrill Mountain be an enormous penis rising over the rides? Would the roller coaster cars be phallus-shaped, plunging into vagina or anus shaped tunnels? And as they passed through the turnstile, it became obvious that this was borne of a hastily gathered preconception. Thrill Mountain the mountain inside Thrill Mountain the park was concrete sprayed on a wire mesh with an artificial waterfall, which several of the roller coasters climbed over or rushed through. As families composed of both wolves and foxes held paws and laughed around them, waiting for the ropes separating the main street shopping and dining area from the surrounding themed regions to drop and let them enjoy the rides, Tarkik realized his concern was silly: the police procedural he had watched with Moon on Monday night was slightly more candid about the fox using his diaper than an Arctican one would have been about the detective using the toilet, but it’s not like it showed the diaper change or the accompanying anal sex on screen. The roller coaster that escaped from the park’s boundaries turned out to be one of the newer ones built since the last time Moon had been to the park, so they joined the informal line behind the ropes waiting to rush into the formal one. Tarkik hadn’t been on any of the rides here, so he didn’t care that much about going on the newest ones when the slightly older ones would have shorter lines, but a big part of coming here was that it would be fun for Moon, so if Moon wanted to ride the latest rides, they’d wait in line for them. When the park employees dropped the rope, Tarkik and Moon bustled briskly along with the crowd to the entrance to the roller coaster. There were separate height guides for wolves and foxes, to Tarkik’s initial surprise, though it made sense; they didn’t stop to check his height, but as arctic foxes are slightly smaller than red foxes he did veer close to it to confirm he was sufficiently tall. He would have felt terrible for Moon to come back after all this time and not be able to enjoy anything but the kit-and-cub rides. They weren’t the first in line for the coaster, so they had to wait about fifteen minutes, but that was short compared to the queue the ride was likely to have later in the day based on how many switchbacks the line area had. As they zig-zagged toward the boarding platform, Tarkik took stock of the equipment. Each car had four seats in a staggered configuration: two small seats front and center for foxes, or similarly-sized animals—he noticed a few groups of non-wolf, non-fox species in the main street area, so this park was apparently a draw beyond the country’s borders—and two larger seats in the back at the sides, intended for wolves. It also made sense why there were two separate height requirement signs at the entrance. And as he got closer still, he noticed the uniforms the staff wore. On each side of the platform a wolf worked ensuring the restraints had locked, and they each wore a collared shirt with powder blue shorts. A fox sat in the control booth, and another counted off group sizes so families rode together. They wore just a collar with a name tag pinned to it, and while he couldn’t see the former’s lower half, he assumed she wore the same thing as the latter: a plain powder blue diaper. It hadn’t occurred to him that some employers might provide uniform diapers for their foxes; he hadn’t seen whether it was the case for the hotel staff, but the diapers the Ferreot restocked the changing table in the room with each day weren’t hotel branded. Before long they were in the lane for one of the middle cars with another wolf and fox, and then climbing into the car. Moon crossed through the car to stash his diaper bag in a cubby hole on the far side, then returned to the seat diagonally behind Tarkik’s, of course, and the employee wolf on their side of the platform checked their restraints before retreating behind the exit gate, giving a thumbs up to their fox in the operator booth, and holding down their dispatch button. The attendant wolf on the other side did the same from a booth at the rear of the platform, and the train rolled out of the station with cheers from most of its occupants. The track took a U-turn outside the station toward the lift hill, which the train climbed at a shocking speed compared to the indoor coaster he rode at the amusement park in the mall, but of course it had to since it was climbing three hundred feet. As it crested the hill, the cars in front of them dangled on the downslope, waiting for the center of gravity of the train to pass the peak, and Tarkik realized just how high three hundred feet was. And then the train began to descend. Tarkik’s tongue lolled out of his mouth as he yelled in excitement, but the wind in his face was so strong he could scarcely breathe until the coaster slowed down by cresting an airtime hill. Everyone around him raised their paws in the air, but he kept his tightly clinging to the handles on the restraints. Even without inversions, it was three of the most exciting minutes of his life, and he was light-headed when the train hit the brake run on the slope heading into the station. When the train had come to a full stop, the restraints released automatically and he stood up. “How was it?” Moon asked. “Amazing,” Tarkik said, then noticed that his diaper was heavier than it had been when he sat down. He hadn’t even felt that he needed to pee, but apparently he found some and released it. Moon spotted it immediately. “Do you need a diaper change?” he asked. “It can wait,” Tarkik replied. “Which one do you want to ride next?”

Chapter 12 Moon pulled out of Petunia and put his paws to his face, sobbing as he fled to the gap between the crib and the changing table. Tarkik shimmied off the bed, intending to ask him what the problem was, but Petunia beat him to it, sliding backwards to her feet, turning around, and rushing over to him in a heartbeat. “Moon, what’s wrong?” she asked. “I’m a failure as a wolf and as a male,” he said between sobs. “Moon, don’t be ridiculous! Moon, look at me,” she said. He raised his muzzle, the sides of his snout moist with tears. “I came three times, okay? You are definitely not a failure as a male.” She paused to give that a chance to sink in, but his mood didn’t improve much. “Do you want to keep going? I can face toward you if you want, or we can do it right here sitting down. You’re very big, so I don’t think you can miss, no matter which angle we use.” “I don’t— I just—” Moon didn’t finish the thought, but it was clear enough to Petunia. “We can try again tomorrow after work,” she offered. “Or even in the morning.” “Thank you, but no thank you,” Moon replied. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more helpful to you.” “You were very helpful,” Petunia said, lifting one of his paws with both of hers and patting him on the back of it. “It’s okay, I’ll ask someone else tomorrow. Maybe Arturo or Colin. But I won’t tell them about you. I’ll let them think they’re the first.” She returned to her underwear and pulled it on, leaving the vibrator bulb in the crotch rather than bothering to put it back inside herself. “But you were the first,” she added. She put her dress back on, then returned her lube to her laptop bag. “I’ll go to the restaurant downstairs. If you want to sit with me, you can. If you don’t want to, that’s okay too. Thank you, though. Both of you.” She reached up to open the door handle and let herself out. Tarkik knew the timing of when to speak up was delicate. Petunia had focused on Moon’s claim to be a failure as a male, but being a failure as a wolf was also important, and unlike her Tarkik knew what the reason for that was, although perhaps she could have guessed from him being available to be Tarkik’s Temporary Wolf. When he seemed to have stopped crying, Tarkik walked up to him, still naked on the floor with a now-flaccid penis. “You’ll have as many chances to be sad about Sun as you want,” he said. “You won’t get as many chances to be happy. You should take advantage of them.” “I tried,” Moon said. “I thought that was what I was doing. But having sex with Petunia wasn’t making me happy.” “Well that’s a good reason to stop, but why not? You haven’t had sex in years, right?” “Not since Sun died.” “So why wasn’t sex with her fun?” “Because it didn’t mean anything,” Moon said. “It was just cumming for the sake of cumming.” “Cumming is fun,” Tarkik insisted. “That’s not why we have sex during diaper changes.” “It seems like a good enough reason, as long as society agrees that it’s allowed.” Moon paused, searching for words. “When I watch shows or movies from other countries, it’s always weird that the wolves don’t have foxes, or vice versa. I have a hard time getting into the heads of characters of other species who don’t know what it’s like.” “I don’t really know what it’s like to have a wolf, or at least a permanent one. I’ve been assuming it’s like siblings, except we don’t have sex with our siblings.” “We absolutely don’t have sex with our siblings either, but that’s not the only reason it’s nothing like siblings. I have siblings, littermates. We were in different classes in school. We have different interests. You can’t have different interests from your fox. If one of you wants to do something, you’re both doing it. It’s like being one person, but you’re split into two bodies. But then for a few minutes at a time, you get to share one body.” “I feel that way about my wife.” “We get married here too, you know.” “Yeah, but it’s like you’re born married to your soulmate, then you get married again for kids.” “A bit, I guess. My dads love my moms, but my dads still have sex with each other.” “It’s hard to imagine how sad I’d be if my wife died,” Tarkik opined. “It’s really hard to imagine how sad I’d be if I’d known her since I was born.” “It took you twenty-something years to meet your fox.” “I am also her fox,” Tarkik stressed, “unless you’re just going by who puts their penis in who.” “And that’s why you couldn’t masturbate while thinking of her?” “Because when we share one body, we both enjoy it. At least I hope she does. It’s important to me that she does. Even masturbating felt like being unfaithful, unless she was on the phone, and she was not into that.” “I guess you understand better than I thought,” Moon said. He perked up. “You know, I only learned the word ‘masturbate’ from the grief counselors? Why else would someone here need to know it?” “So there were grief counselors?” “Yeah, they were useless. They still had each other. What did they know?” Tarkik tried not to laugh too hard, but that was clearly a bit of a joke. “So what does make you happy?” “Being useful,” Moon said. “Feeling like there was a reason for me to stay.” “I meant more like a leisure thing,” Tarkik said. “Like a hobby, an activity, a sport or game you like to watch or play.” Moon thought for a moment. “Canine Wonderland.” “Is that like an amusement park or something?” “It’s a cluster of three amusement parks, but Thrill Mountain is the best one. It has all the roller coasters and stuff. Sun and I went there a bunch when we were teenagers. I haven’t been since we started college. They’ve put in a bunch of new rides since then.” “Wanna go? On Saturday or something, I mean. I can’t go home for the weekend because by the time I got there I’d only have time to sleep before I had to get on the train back. I have to do something. Let’s go to Thrill Mountain. My treat.” “I appreciate that,” Moon said. “You were going to call home, right? Talk to your girls?” “They’re probably having dinner,” Tarkik replied. “Let’s go down to the restaurant, then I’ll call them when we’ve eaten.” Moon nodded, then put a paw behind himself to push off the ground. “Do you need a diaper change before we go?” “Are you in good shape to give one? Emotionally?” “It’s my job to change you when you need it, no matter how I feel.” “Then you put your pants back on, and I’ll need one by the time you’re dressed.” Tarkik stepped aside to let Moon out of the gap between the crib and the changing table, then bore down. The yellow spot on the front of the diaper appeared immediately; it was joined soon after by the ‘flump’ of him pushing a load of poop into the back. Moon shook his head as he stepped into his boxers. “You know you’re not supposed to hold it,” he said. “Remember what happened yesterday?” “It was like ten minutes,” Tarkik replied when he had finished wetting himself. “I thought it would be a turn-off.” “Petunia dumped the turds out of her underwear,” Moon pointed out as he pulled up his trousers, “and you’ve seen what usually happens on changing tables. Why would a fox in a dirty diaper be a turn-off for a wolf?” “I don’t know. I’m pretty sure it would turn off my wife.” “Well that just sounds like a skill issue,” Moon said as he lifted Tarkik by the armpits and laid him on the changing table. A laugh burst out of Tarkik’s lips—that was definitely meant as a joke, and Moon smiled as he opened the front of Tarkik’s diaper and started cleaning him up. But as he continued, Tarkik had a worrying thought. Being useful made Moon happy, so being his Temporary Wolf was probably the happiest he’d been in years. How was he going to feel when Tarkik went home?

Chapter 11 “In my country, a single doe’s fertility belongs to the community,” Petunia explained as they walked toward the hotel. “A married doe’s fertility belongs to her husband.” “That’s awful,” Moon said, and while Tarkik agreed, he thought that disapproval was a bit rich considering Moon had chided him for not respecting Wolfoxia’s customs, although it had at least recently fixed its own consent problem. “It’s not as bad as it was,” Petunia continued. “My grandmother told me in her day they’d annul your marriage if you didn’t pop out enough food litters.” “You don’t have those now though, right?” Tarkik asked. “You can still declare a litter as food. They’ll electrobotomize them at birth, and you just have to nurse them until they’re weaned, then drop them off and they take care of the rest.” “They still eat rabbit in Arborea?” Tarkik asked. “They don’t here or in Arctica?” “Fish and Meatfruit,” Moon said. “Same,” Tarkik said. “We have to import the Meatfruit because it’s too cold to grow it.” “Developing Meatfruit definitely helped, but we only have enough to export to you because some of our predators still prefer warm flesh.” Tarkik suddenly felt complicit in a system that disgusted him. “Anyways, that’s why every doe tries to get married before she turns eighteen, so there’s no window for someone to claim your fertility for the community. Not that the bucks care about the community, they just want to nut, but that’s their excuse. And it wasn’t going well for me, and then the day before my birthday someone from one of my classes proposed to me. I don’t think we’d ever talked. But he gave me a simple ring,” she held out her paw with an unadorned steel wedding band, “and we went to city hall after class to make it official.” “So why do you want to cheat on him?” Tarkik asked. “My husband prefers the company of bucks,” she said. “We have a deal. I work, he doesn’t. He gets to have sex with any guy he wants to, and the ring he gave me means I don’t have to have sex with any guy I don’t want to. It may not be the best deal, but it’s better than no deal. But it means I’m a thirty year old virgin, which is insane for a rabbit. I’m so frustrated I use an internal vibrator all the time, which doesn’t even help that much, and I can’t have sex with anyone of any species in Arborea because they do still get on your case if they find out your marriage is a sham. Like, divorce is not optional. I figured this trip was my chance to get laid without news making it back home.” They were arriving at the hotel. “Now I wasn’t expecting all the foxes to be wearing diapers, but I could have gotten past that, except the foxes here don’t need to have sex with me because they just have sex with their wolf, and everyone else at the summit is taller than us. So what do you think?” Tarkik had a worrying realization. “I’m married, and mine isn’t a sham,” he said. “But you’re not wearing a ring! Why didn’t you say so sooner?” “Rings aren’t common in Arctica because of the cold,” Tarkik said. “And I thought maybe you meant Moon.” Moon apparently didn’t think she meant Moon, because he suddenly snapped to attention. “Gods, he is a lot bigger than me. I already thought a fox would be a stretch. But I do have lube for the vibrator, and we can always stop if it doesn’t fit. Moon, what do you think? Would you like to try having sex with me?” Moon’s face said he wasn’t sure, but Petunia’s expression was pleading and Tarkik’s was encouraging. “Sure, I guess,” he said. Since Petunia’s room was sized more comfortably for a rabbit, she followed Tarkik and Moon to theirs. On arrival, she stared at the extra furniture in the room as she put her laptop bag by the door. “Okay, I get the changing table,” she said, “but why is there a crib in here?” “Idunno, foxes sleep in cribs,” Moon said. She didn’t seem satisfied by that. “It’s the right size for a fox, and the mattress is covered in plastic in case their diaper leaks.” “You can get plastic covers for regular mattresses,” Tarkik pointed out. “Wouldn’t wolves who wet the bed need those?” “Wolves small enough to wet the bed probably haven’t moved out of the crib yet,” Moon asserted. “You know what, never mind,” Petunia said, reaching down to the hem of her dress and pulling it over her head, revealing vinyl underwear with double elastic around the legs, waist, and tail. The pink battery pack for her vibrator was clipped to the front waistband. “I didn’t know rabbits wore diapers too,” Moon said. “What are you talking about?” Petunia asked as she dumped her dress on the floor. “These are underwear.” She started toward the washroom. “Let me just dump the turds out in the toilet,” she said. Moon stared at Tarkik, unsure why she had contradicted him. “They poop a lot of times a day, but they’re dry, and they don’t wet them, so they’re not really diapers,” Tarkik explained quietly. It was the kind of thing you learn in elementary school the first time you have a rabbit or hare in your gym class, but Wolfoxia was overwhelmingly populated by just the two canine species, so apparently Moon never had. The toilet flushed, and Petunia returned from the washroom, grabbing a small plastic bottle from her laptop bag on the way to the bed. “Okay, pants off, let’s see what we’re cramming inside me,” she said. “Tarkik, would you mind giving us some privacy?” “I don’t think I can,” Tarkik said. Petunia was unconvinced. “I’m not going to use the toilet, but you can see how they’d be suspicious of a fox being in there without their wolf to make sure, right?” “There isn’t really such a thing as privacy between a wolf and their fox,” Moon added. “You’re married, though.” Petunia asked. “I’m not doing anything,” Tarkik said. “I could look away. Or, would it be helpful to both of you if I made sure everything that happened was what you consented to?” “Even if I was from a country that thought my consent mattered,” Petunia said, “I don’t think a consent witness is something anyone has worried about. And are you really independent if your wolf is one of the participants?” “He won’t be my wolf in two weeks,” Tarkik replied. Petunia looked at Moon, who didn’t seem upset by this suggestion, which she took some reassurance in. “Okay. Moon, let’s get you lubed up.” Tarkik pulled himself onto the bed and sat on the corner while Moon pulled down his trousers and boxers, presenting his penis to Petunia. “Yes, we are going to need this,” she said, squirting a dollop of lube from the bottle into her paw, then applying it to Moon’s penis thoroughly, but carefully, not wanting to end things before they began. She then pulled her underwear down to her thighs, pulled the vibrator bulb out of herself by its power cord, and dropped it in the crotch of the underwear. She inserted her still-lubed fingers into herself a few times, then pulled her underwear the rest of the way down and stepped out of them. She turned toward the bed, then realized she would get the lube from her paw on the bedspread. Moon went to the changing table for a wet wipe, then returned to the bed and used it to clean the lube off Petunia’s paw as best he could. She pulled herself onto the bed, laying face down with her hindquarters hanging off the end. “Can you face up?” Moon asked. “Like, toward me?” “My sensitive spot is on the front, and yours is on the underside,” Petunia said, “so this way aligns our incentives.” Moon took a deep breath, then aimed the tip of his penis at the entrance to her vagina with his paw. “You’ve only ever had anal sex, right?” Petunia asked suddenly, and he stopped what he was doing. “Yes,” he replied. “Just remember you’re not doing that now,” she said. “I know,” Moon replied. He touched the tip of his penis to her sex, then realized he no longer knew what to do with his paws and decided to place them on the edge of the bed. He took another breath, then pushed gently into her. Tarkik didn’t actually worry that Moon would do anything to harm Petunia intentionally. His main concern was that he would harm her unintentionally, and having someone to tell him that was happening so he could stop immediately would be a service to both of them. He assured himself that as long as he didn’t enjoy himself, he wasn’t cheating on his wife, and he was pleased to find that he did not get aroused inside his diaper at the sight of Moon filling Petunia gradually with his maleness. “Ooh! I think that’s as deep as you can go,” Petunia said. Moon had barely inserted himself past his glans, but as requested, he reversed course, slowly pulling himself out until there was hardly any of himself left in her, then gradually pushing back in. Tarkik wondered whether a rabbit’s vagina or a fox’s colon was more fragile, then wondered whether he should wonder that. Whichever it was, Moon seemed to be using his experience in the latter to motivate his sex with the former. His thrusts were precise and methodical, and Tarkik observed Petunia’s face closely for signs of pain. She did close her eyes and clench her fingers briefly, but she quickly relaxed them. Tarkik turned his attention to the business end. There was no blood on Moon’s penis, and he didn’t see any sign of prolapse, so other than any long-term stretching, it seemed Moon wasn’t doing any harm, which Tarkik was glad for, because Moon clearly hadn’t had any sex since Sun died, and getting a chance to have it with a willing partner for the first time in years must be making him happy. So sure was Tarkik of that that his attention was directed only on Petunia, until by chance he glanced up and saw something he should have noticed sooner. “Moon, are you crying?” he asked.

Chapter 10 Tarkik woke up to the sound of Moon’s alarm and immediately noticed that his diaper was wet, but we remembered wetting it the night before, and it felt the same amount wet as it had then. More importantly, he needed to pee, suggesting that his bedwetting the night he arrived was a consequence of his exhaustion after the long travel day, and not something that he would have to worry about once he went home—after how silly Atuat found his diaper wearing on their video call, he would not have been eager to explain to her that he would need to wear them in the bed they shared. All of that notwithstanding, he was wearing a diaper, so he released his urine into it while Moon swung his feet off the bed and eventually forced himself to stand up, stretch, and walk over to the crib. “Do you need a diaper change?” Moon asked as he lowered the rail on the crib. “After coffee,” Tarkik said, and Moon seemed satisfied by that, so he lifted Tarkik by the armpits and placed him on his feet on the floor, and they walked to the kitchen together. Moon started the coffeemaker running, and since Tarkik couldn’t easily reach the counter it wasn’t like he could help with anything anyways, so he carefully took his place in his high chair and waited for the coffee to be ready. When it was, Moon poured them each a cup of their respective size, put oat milk in his own, then brought the two cups to the table, placing the small one with black coffee in front of Tarkik. There was no pause for sadness or frustration this time—Tarkik didn’t expect Moon to have forgotten about Sun, or his sadness over losing him, but he seemed to be getting back into the rhythm of having a fox, and having somewhere to go and something specific to do in the morning, and while both of those situations would end a week Saturday, until then he didn’t feel useless or alone. About halfway through the cup, the coffee had its familiar effect, and Tarkik lifted his tail and leaned forward slightly and pushed a small mass of soft poop into his diaper, the volume less than it might have been because of the suppository the night before. He sat back, flattening the poop under him and pressing it into his fur. “Do you need a diaper change?” Moon asked again. “Once I’m finished my coffee,” Tarkik said. He was perhaps making the eventual diaper change more difficult by waiting, but not having to deal with it right away was the usual purpose of a diaper. Not that Tarkik was going out of his way to make the diaper change more difficult, either, but Moon had made it clear that he wouldn't be talked out of the arrangement, and resisting it had already caused Tarkik more trouble than he wanted. This was the way things were done here, and until he was on the train home, he would do them. Moon finished his coffee first, since it was cooled by the oat milk and therefore easier to drink, so he dumped out the grounds and filter from the coffee maker while Tarkik finished his own, then washed both their mugs and the carafe in the sink. He left the mugs upside-down on a tea towel next to the sink, then returned to the table. Tarkik stood up on the chair, but rather than trying to dismount by himself he put his arms out and waited for Moon to pick him up, supporting him with a paw on the seat of his diaper, pressing his mess against his anus and testicles. In spite of himself, Tarkik felt an erection growing. That was the one part of the arrangement that he wasn’t playing along with, although it had been made clear that consent was his to give or not, so explicitly withholding it was playing along in that sense. Moon swung by the diaper bag next to the door to collect the portable package of wet wipes the hotel had provided before taking Tarkik to the bedroom. He undid the tail tape on Tarkik’s diaper immediately before laying him on his back on the changing table, then opened the front tapes of the diaper, revealing the thoroughly soaked padding, the mess pressed into the fur of his bottom, and the erection. He looked at the third of those for a moment, and Tarkik briefly thought he would offer a bottom-cumming again, despite his seeming tacit assent to Tarkik’s request not to. Instead he took one of the dried-out wipes from the tub he had bought when Sun was still alive and slid it between Tarkik’s penis and abdomen. “Think about your wife,” he suggested, then took one of the wet wipes from the portable package and set to work cleaning the poop out of Tarkik’s fur. Tarkik tilted his head back, closed his eyes, grabbed his penis, and thought about when he and Atuat were trying to get pregnant, but the memory of the fur on the back of her neck wasn’t the part of her he loved. He skipped ahead, and thought instead of while she was pregnant, when they could have all the sex they wanted in any position they wanted, and were face to face. The little smiles, the nuzzling and love bites, the joy they both felt at the family they were about to start. And then he felt another stroke of a wet wipe across his testicles. He tried to pretend it was Atuat’s tail, but that wouldn’t have been moist. He thought ahead to after the girls were born, when they didn’t want to have another litter yet, so they were doing different things in the bedroom. He imagined her running her tongue up and down his penis, then lapping at his testicles, and then his perineum. That part wasn’t something she had actually done, and if she had she probably would have done it erotically, unlike Moon who was being businesslike. As he desperately pumped at his penis with his paw, he pretended it was Atuat changing his diaper, but it was no use—based on her comments the night before, that wasn’t something she was interested in, or him for that matter. By the time the wiping stopped, Tarkik was less erect than he had been when he started. He opened his eyes and looked sheepishly at Moon, who seemed to be waiting for him to finish while he could hardly even start. “Yeah, it’s not happening,” Moon said, releasing his penis, which had barely produced any precum. Moon used the dry wipe to mop up what little there was, then dropped it in the seat of the diaper on top of Tarkik’s poop and the wet wipes that had cleaned it up and lifted his bottom off it by the ankles so he could roll it up and replace it with a clean one. They stopped at the hotel again on the way to the office, and housekeeping had replaced the portable package of wet wipes, so Moon stashed the new one and a few of the diapers from the room’s changing table in his diaper bag. They met up with a few of the summit attendees at breakfast. The first item on their day’s agenda was to attend the standup meeting with the team they were embedding with, and Tarkik braced himself for the boredom of status updates, but the meeting actually only took five minutes—it was short enough that you wouldn’t mind standing up for it, like the name suggested. The trick was that everyone wasn’t saying what they’d done or not, both because things weren’t assigned to them until they needed something to do, and because you could see what had been done from the progress board. All they needed to say was if anything had changed, like if a work item was more complicated than originally planned, or had a dependency they hadn’t realized in advance. It was so short that none of the attendees even used their diapers during it—it was weird to have them all leave the room without any fox requesting a sex act from their wolf, but it gave Tarkik, Moon, and Petunia a chance to swing by a communal fridge for a can of flavored seltzer each. Once again, Tarkik heard the buzzing noise, he presumed from Petunia’s phone; at least whoever was texting her had waited until the standup meeting was done, though it wasn’t clear how they could know. Most of the day was filled with classroom sessions with Frank and Frank where they explained the way sprints were supposed to work, what the estimation cards were for, and so on. After lunch there was a gap before the next classroom session for them to catch up with their teams remotely, since other than Moon they were all managers. Out of curiosity, Tarkik looked up Moon in the company directory, and it seemed they had assigned him a cubicle. They went there together, and found they had given him a workstation with instructions on a sticky note for setting up his initial password. Once that was done, he did some independent study on the internal framework’s documentation while Tarkik coordinated with his team in Arctica. They were all pretty tired when the afternoon classroom session finished. “Are you headed straight to the Ferreot today?” Petunia asked them. “Yep, we’ll go over with you,” Tarkik said, and Moon nodded in agreement. “Did you end up eating at the hotel restaurant, or going off site? I assume you need veggie-veggie food, not Meatfruit, and I didn’t know if they had it there.” “They have both—that’s why I booked the Ferreot,” Petunia said. “Aput was a Snowshoe Hare, right?” Moon asked. “Of course, that would be why he booked there!” Tarkik exclaimed. Moon really was sharp. As they walked out of the building, Tarkik heard the buzzing coming from Petunia again, and again she didn’t touch her phone, and finally the curiosity got the better of him. “Petunia, do you get a lot of text messages?” he asked. “Because I keep hearing this buzzing, like a silent notification on your phone, but you never check it. You don’t have earbuds in, so you’re not getting them dictated to you.” “You can hear that?” Petunia asked, and Tarkik and Moon nodded. “The sound you’re hearing is my vibrator,” she said under her breath. Then, after a pause, she asked, “Would you mind having sex with me?”

Chapter 9 Moon returned from the washroom gingerly carrying a liquid glycerin suppository. It looked like a small transparent fig between his fingers, but to Tarkik it looked intimidatingly large. “I’m not sure if they even make these in fox sizes,” Moon said. “Because foxes here can’t get constipated because their assholes are stretched out?” Tarkik hypothesized. “Vixens’ aren’t,” Moon retorted. Tarkik placed his paws on the armrest of the couch and leaned against it. Moon undid the tape over Tarkik’s tail and pulled down the back of his diaper, and Tarkik took a deep breath as he felt the nozzle of the plastic bulb penetrate his anus. Moon squeezed the bulb thoroughly, then pulled out the nozzle and redid the tape over Tarkik’s tail. “It’ll take about twenty minutes to work,” Moon said, returning to the bathroom to throw away the empty bulb. “I think keeping your bum in the air helps it soak in better. I can put you in the crib if you want.” Tarkik didn’t want to be in the crib or to make the glycerin more effective, but he only had himself to blame. If there was anything that might make Moon relent on letting him use the toilet, it might be releasing an enema there instead of into his diaper, but nothing in Moon’s demeanor suggested he resented Tarkik for the difficulty of the impending diaper change. But ultimately Tarkik had suggested they come here for a purpose, and losing twenty minutes plus however long the diaper change would take might make them fail to achieve that purpose in the time they had before they needed to sleep. “Does this building have a laundry room?” Tarkik asked. “There’s one in the basement,” Moon confirmed. “Let’s get your laundry started, then. It can run while the laxative works.” Moon and Tarkik sorted the laundry strewn about Moon’s bedroom into a basket each for cold and warm wash, both of which were piled to overflowing. Moon carried one basket with his paws and Tarkik balanced the other on his head, steadied with both arms, as they took the elevator to the basement. It had been a while since Tarkik had needed a laundromat, but this one was pretty nice by the standard he remembered—the machines were combined washers and dryers, took payment by mobile phone, automatically dispensed detergent, and would send a text message when the load was almost finished so you could get back to the basement in time to pick up your clothes while they were still warm. There were two machines free, and they started a load in each of them before taking the elevator back to the apartment. Tarkik brought a few garbage bags from the kitchen and started sorting cans, garbage, and recyclable paper, while stacking real mail for Moon to check later. Moon washed the coffee cups from the morning, plus some leftover plates from previous days, then started washing the cups in the cupboard that had a coating of dust on them. Once those were clean, he started on the sink and counters. After about twenty minutes, pretty much all of the floor in the living and dining area was visible, and Tarkik stood admiring the overstuffed garbage bags near the door, as his gut produced a loud growl and a strong cramp, which bent him over at the waist. Moon rinsed his paws off in the kitchen sink at the sound, then came to the living area to check. “Ready to let it out?” he asked. “The longer I hold it, the better it’ll work,” Tarkik suggested through gritted teeth. “That’s how you got in this position,” Moon pointed out. Whether Tarkik thought he had a point or not didn’t matter. He put his paws on his knees, crouched down, and pushed a torrent of mushy stool and greasy sludge into the seat of his diaper. He stood upright. “Would you like a diaper change?” Moon asked, as though the answer weren’t obvious. “Yes, please,” Tarkik said, taking a step toward the bedroom before feeling another cramp. He leaned over again, and the liquid sludge, too viscous for the diaper’s topsheet to allow to pass through, slid forward to Tarkik’s crotch where it coated his penis and testicles. By the time this fresh wave of feces had joined its predecessor, he felt like all the fur beneath the diaper was coated in runny poop, and when he took another two waddling steps toward the bedroom he felt the mess slosh around between his thighs. “Actually, I think I need a shower,” Tarkik said. Moon led Tarkik to the bathroom, which also needed a thorough cleaning, and Tarkik considered that maybe he should do that before the shower, but by the feel of it, removing the diaper could undo that work. Moon started the thermostatic faucet in the tub and turned on the shower, which had two sprayer heads, the lower of them detachable with a long handle, then left for his bedroom briefly, returning with the diaper pail that had been next to the changing table. Tarkik waited for him, reasonably sure that he wasn’t supposed to take the diaper off himself and concerned that even if he was, it would make a worse mess. Moon put the diaper pail next to the toilet, then started undressing. It seemed reasonable to Tarkik that he didn’t want his clothes to get dirty while removing the diaper, until he took off his boxer shorts, at which point it became clear that he expected them to shower together, which was not at all what Tarkik had in mind. But wolves pay their debt by taking care of foxes, and a diaper change includes cleaning the affected area, and Moon would do that most effectively by being in the shower with Tarkik. Moon tested the water coming out of the showerhead and it had warmed up, so he turned the water off and got in the shower. “Come on,” he said to Tarkik, who did, trying to imagine himself in the changeroom at the rec center, where there would sometimes be animals of larger species, and they’d all be naked, and they could get through a shower without it being such a big deal, although they wouldn’t be touching him, and his face wasn’t going to be so close to a penis that had recently been offered to penetrate his anus. Moon undid the tape over Tarkik’s tail, then lifted him by the armpits and laid him down on the floor of the tub, feet toward the drain. He opened the tapes on the front of Tarkik’s diaper and pulled it open. Tarkik could now see that the fecal slurry covering his crotch was worse than it had felt, but again Moon gave no sign that he was upset at his obligation. He grabbed Tarkik’s ankles and lifted him off the diaper, then slid it closer to the drain. Tarkik was careful to spread his feet when Moon let go of them so they wouldn’t fall into the mess. Moon lifted the back of the diaper, letting the unabsorbed liquid flow toward the drain, before rolling up the diaper so the solids were mostly contained and placing it carefully in the diaper pail outside the tub. He then drew the shower curtain and turned the water and shower back on, letting the water from the upper shower head run down his back as he grabbed the lower detachable shower head. Tarkik stood up, and Moon pinched the tip of his tail between two fingers and held it up as he sprayed warm water on Tarkik’s befouled lower regions, letting the filth run down his legs and into the drain. “Turn around,” he said, and Tarkik obliged so Moon could douse his crotch with the warm water. Moon paused the water and grabbed a bottle of shampoo from the shelf, squirting a fair quantity into a paw, then putting the bottle back and rubbing his paws together, forming a great quantity of lather. He crouched down and started rubbing the lather into Tarkik’s fur, starting from his feet and going up past his knees to his thighs. Then he skipped up to the waist and continued up his torso, then his arms. He gently turned Tarkik around by the shoulders, shampooed his scalp, then down his back and along the length of his tail, before standing back up and collecting the bottle again. “Paws out,” he said, and Tarkik turned to face him and held his paws cupped. Moon dispensed some shampoo into Tarkik’s paws, and it didn’t need to be said why he had done it. Tarkik worked up a lather, then rubbed it into his genitals and deep into his butt crack. When he stopped, Moon turned the faucet back on and thoroughly rinsed the suds out of Tarkik’s fur, front and back. He only gave his own fur a perfunctory wash before stopping the faucet. He reached out of the tub for a fluffy towel hanging from the rack and dried Tarkik’s fur vigorously, then wrapped the towel around him. Tarkik held it in place while Moon reached for a second towel and wrapped it around his own waist, then picked up Tarkik, carried him from the bathroom to the bedroom, and laid him gently on the changing table. Tarkik wondered how often Moon had done this with Sun. Had this been a weekly routine, or a nightly one? After a thorough and intimate wash, had they come back to this changing table, its surface at the height of Moon’s crotch, for Moon to fill Sun’s colon with his maleness, and eventually his seed? But he realized it wouldn’t have been like this. Moon probably hadn’t made Sun wash his own crotch. Tarkik had made it clear that he had no interest in being unfaithful, and Moon had avoided touching him anywhere that belonged to his wife, so he relaxed on the changing table as Moon opened Tarkik’s towel and slid it above his waist, then crouched down to get a clean diaper from the package on the floor. Tarkik was confident—and correct—that the towel around Moon’s waist would stay in place as he unfolded the diaper, placed it under Tarkik, and expertly taped it closed. After putting the clean diaper on Tarkik, Moon re-dressed himself, then they continued cleaning the apartment, scrubbing the bathroom, mopping the kitchen and dining room floor, and vacuuming the living area, pausing only to collect the laundry from the machine in the basement and drop off the garbage, recycling, and used diapers at their respective chutes on the way. If there was anything left to be done, it was that the sheets on Moon’s bed hadn’t been changed, and the slip cover on his couch could use a wash, but they left those alone. At 10:30, they looked around the apartment, satisfied that it was presentable. “Thanks,” Moon said. “I just didn’t…” he trailed off. Tarkik didn’t need him to finish. It was clear that the depression from losing Sun had made him feel like there was no point in keeping the place presentable. He probably never expected anyone else to visit. Hopefully that habit was broken and he could keep it clean without help. They sat on the couch and Moon turned on the TV. A police drama was playing, and it occurred to Tarkik why Arctica imported TV series and movies from countries other than Wolfoxia. Then he realized what the time was. “Am I allowed to masturbate in my diaper?” he asked. “Where else would you masturbate?” Moon countered. “I mean there’s not a rule that I can only cum during sex, is there?” “You should never have to cum without help, but there’s no rule about it.” “Good. I’m going to call my wife. Do you mind turning the volume down?” “Go ahead,” Moon said, muting the TV, which turned on the closed captions. Tarkik retrieved his phone from his laptop bag, then returned to the couch and video-called his wife Atuat, keeping the camera closely focused on his head. She picked up quickly. “Hi, honey,” she said as the background of their house moved behind the image of her head. “You’re calling pretty late. The girls are already in bed.” “I actually think that’s a good thing,” Tarkik said. “How’s the summit going?” she asked. “Fine so far,” Tarkik replied. He didn’t feel like he needed to worry her by mentioning that he had opted into a Performance Improvement Plan. “So, how much do you know about Wolfoxia?” “Not that much,” she said. “I know Wolfia and Foxia merged a while back. They called it a mutual annexation or something. It’s not part of the school curriculum, and we never get books or shows from there, so I guess we don’t learn much more.” “Yeah, so it turns out the terms of the mutual annexation were that they paired up wolves with foxes, and the foxes wear and use diapers, and the wolves have to change them.” “Are you serious?” she asked. “Oh, and they pretty much always have sex during the diaper changes. Right on the changing table in the middle of the public washroom.” “That’s pretty weird.” “And, uh, they don’t make exceptions for visitors.” He pulled the phone away from his face and tilted it down so she could see that he was wearing nothing but the diaper, which was still dry at least, but he still felt the return of the shame he’d started to get over when around the locals. “Wow, they use baby diapers?” “Yeah, I guess fox adults and wolf toddlers are the same size, or close enough that they don’t make different sizes.” “But they’re not making you use them, are they?” Atuat asked. “Like, they can’t make you use a diaper.” “That’s like saying they can’t make you pay for things at the store,” Tarkik replied. “First, they can, and second, if you don’t and they catch you, there are consequences. And they assigned me a wolf to take care of the results.” Her face turned grim. “And you’ve been having sex with him?” “What? No!” “Well why would you even mention that, then?” “It was supposed to be a fun fact.” He hadn’t thought she’d react like that at all. “Moon, can you tell her?” he asked, pointing his phone’s front camera at the wolf. “Hi Mrs. Tiqri… gannig?” Moon said. “Sorry, it was long, and I only heard it once.” “Just call me Atuat,” Tarkik’s wife said. “Mrs. Atuat, I offered to cum your husband’s bottom, and he told me never to ask again because the answer would always be no.” Tarkik turned the phone back toward himself. “And when I get home you can check to see that my ass hasn’t been stretched out by a wolf cock, because that seems like the kind of thing you’d be able to tell.” “Sorry, did he say he offered to cum your bottom?” she asked. “That’s the most offensive thing I’ve ever heard.” “Really? It seems like the least offensive way of describing it,” Tarkik said. “I just meant using ‘cum’ as a transitive verb.” Tarkik chuckled. She was a high school teacher, so that reaction made sense from her. “Anyways, I know I only left a day and a half ago, but I already miss you,” he said, his free paw sliding down his stomach to the front of his diaper, which he started to knead. “I know two weeks doesn’t seem like so much, but I don’t think we’ve been apart that long since we were married.” “Hold on, Tarkik, are you masturbating in your diaper?” Atuat asked, giggling. “I can hear the crinkling!” “Well, like I said, I miss you,” Tarkik replied, his shame rising anew. “I miss you too, but not enough to wank in a pair of litter-pants,” she said. “I should hang up before I wake the girls with my laughing.” “I love you,” Tarkik said, wanting to get it out in case she hung up abruptly. “I love you too,” Atuat replied through giggles. “Call sooner tomorrow so you can talk to the girls.” “I will,” Tarkik said. “Voice only,” he added. She hung up. He continued to knead the front of the diaper for a few seconds, but it was pointless. He wet himself a little as Moon unmuted the TV.

Chapter 8 After lunch, Tarkik, Moon, and Petunia embedded with their team to observe their performance. The physical aspect of this observation didn’t take long: every fox sat in their wolf’s lap and they did pair programming, with some teams consistent about who typed and who reviewed, and others switching back and forth. And of course once in a while the fox would ask for a diaper change, and maybe they’d finish their current work item and send it off for review before waddling off to the washroom for a bottom-cumming. The other aspect of this observation was the results of the work they did, so Petunia kept her laptop screen on the progress board and announced when a pair assigned themselves a new item, while Tarkik and Moon meant to keep Tarkik’s screen on the internal code review page so they could shadow the team lead’s thought process on what changes to request. Moon had a basic familiarity with the programming language the team used from his introductory class, but not with the details of the framework the service was implemented in, so Tarkik loaded the codebase in the company’s internal code search and navigation tool and explained things like how the dependency injection system figured out which object to construct. Eventually that turned into letting Moon click around and ask questions at his own speed; he was legitimately an intern and that was a valid use of his first day, even if it meant they needed Petunia to tip them off to new changes so they could go back to shadowing the reviews. Tarkik felt like it was a bit unfair to her; he knew she was on a Performance Improvement Plan, and needed this summit to go well to keep her job; he at least had a bit of runway since he wasn’t officially on the plan, but if his team didn’t improve then he might never get a chance go on it, if he’d already technically been through it without getting the intended results. Tarkik was also making a concerted effort to squirt out his urine a little at a time, “fox-style,” as Moon had described it, so that he would know he had reached the limit of his diaper’s capacity before going too far past it. He was fairly impressed by the diaper’s absorbency. When the girls were little he’d never risked them overflowing, but as the one wearing it, it got thicker as he peed into it, but it didn’t get wetter. Until suddenly, after one squirt, it did. “I need a diaper change, please,” he said to Moon quietly. “Okay,” Moon replied. He pushed the chair back with his feet as he put his paws in Tarkik’s armpits and lifted him off his lap. Tarkik didn’t feel any leaking, thankfully. Moon placed Tarkik gently on the ground, and they headed for the washroom, with Tarkik waddling conspicuously, but if anyone paid any attention to them it was only in surprise that, as requested, Moon hadn’t made an offer of anal sex. When half your adult population gets their diapers changed by the other half, washrooms have more diaper change tables than stalls, as changes take longer, but even with four, all of the tables were in use and there was a queue. Tarkik turned away from the tables, uninterested in seeing another fox’s bottom get wiped or cummed. He considered that under queueing theory, since his diaper was wet and he would not be having sex with Moon, his diaper change would be fastest, so they should get to cut in line, but another reasonable argument was that unlike the locals he was capable of holding his remaining urine, and therefore the cost of letting other foxes go in front of him was lower. But if his diaper was truly full, then maybe he should go ahead? But he hadn’t pooped, so he should let foxes who had get cleaned up, assuming foxes here consider a messy diaper uncomfortable. It all seemed to balance out to everyone waiting their turn. “Hold our place,” Moon said, ducking into an unoccupied stall, and Tarkik did. Moon was the local expert on what constituted being in each other’s presence, so if he thought he was allowed to be behind the partition door while Tarkik waited outside, it must be fine, and Tarkik wasn’t eager to watch Moon use the toilet, whether or not he himself was allowed to. As he heard the noise of Moon slipping off his trousers in the washroom stall, Tarkik felt the urge to poop again. There could be an argument that if he was ever going to mess his diaper, while he was already waiting to get his diaper changed was the best time for it, but he had a few reservations. First, it’s hard to poop without peeing, and if his diaper was already full to overflowing, then peeing more into it could cause a leak, which the washroom was the best place for but he still assumed it was best not to do. Second, even if he pooped without peeing, the added pressure of the poop could force liquid out of the diaper’s padding, and it would still leak. As a white-furred animal, he wanted to avoid a leak at all costs, especially if poop were involved at all, as his experience from the girls told him it would be less of a wet wipe cleanup and more of a sponge bath situation. And third, he just didn’t want to do it. It was getting close to the end of the workday, and once he was alone with Moon outside the office he could make his argument that because he didn’t need diapers, it was better for both of them for him to be allowed to use the toilet when nobody else would know. He clenched his sphincter, and it took longer this time, but he was finally able to suppress the urge to poop. He heard a flush from the stall, and Moon emerged, washed his paws in the sink, then rejoined Tarkik in the queue. “Are you staying at the Ferreot?” Petunia asked when the work day was done. “We are, but we need to stop off at the badging office for Moon,” Tarkik replied. “Okay,” she said. As she left, Tarkik heard the same buzzing noise he had heard earlier. He wondered whether getting so many texts was the reason she was on a Performance Improvement Plan, but she never seemed to check the messages. The wolf and fox at the badging office took a picture of Moon, and about fifteen minutes later he had a photo badge with a green border, indicating he was an intern in case there were parts of the building he couldn’t go, but otherwise he could be anywhere he needed to for the next two weeks without drawing any attention. And they had lanyards in the badging office, so Tarkik grabbed one so he didn’t need to clip his badge to the strap of his laptop bag anymore. “Should we go back to the hotel?” Moon asked. “Well, we need to eat, and I’m travelling so I can expense meals, but you live here so you can’t,” Tarkik said, ”but I assume restaurants in Wolfoxia serve food in wolf-and-fox-sized portions?” “Some places let you mix and match,” Moon said, “but yes.” “Let’s see if we can find something for both of us that fits into my per diem,” Tarkik said. “Thank you,” Moon said. “Then the hotel?” “Actually, I think we should go back to your apartment, and I’ll help you clean up.” Moon knew the restaurants near his apartment better than the ones in Union Square, and he knew they’d be less expensive, so they rode the subway to the stop in his neighborhood. Meatfruit ravioli in tomato sauce might not have been the fanciest meal Tarkik could have justified on his expense account, but it was home-cooking quality and the money went to a mom-and-pop shop. Or did they call them moms-and-pops shops here, Tarkik wondered. They reached Moon’s apartment around 7pm. Tarkik laid his laptop bag near the door and started making a plan for what to clean up first. Moon put the diaper bag next to it, then asked, “Do you need a diaper change?” “No, thank you,” Tarkik replied. “You haven’t pooped all day. Did you use the toilet?” Moon asked with an accusatory tone. “When would I have been able to do that?” Tarkik countered. “I don’t know, maybe while I was in the stall, you used the next one and they let you back in line.” “There were witnesses. Would they have let a fox do that without saying something?” “They wouldn’t have held someone else’s fox to stop them, and you didn’t answer.” “No, I haven’t used the toilet since I was on the train from Arctica,” Tarkik said truthfully, “but unlike foxes from here, I can hold it. When we’re here or in the hotel room, it seems like it would be better for both of us if you would let me.” “Why don’t you respect our customs?” Moon asked. “It’s more inconvenient for the company that we have to stay together than it is for me, and if you want to have a liberal attitude toward sex then I guess that’s fine. But you have to realize that this was some Wolfian general’s kink, and you’re all putting yourselves through it like it’s not the silliest demand of the three.” “It’s the most important one of the three!” Moon shouted, then lowered his tone, afraid of annoying his neighbors. “Wolfia was a military dictatorship. Nobody knew why Foxia would let itself get taken over, or why you’d let us treat you like babies. But it was actually Foxia that took over Wolfia, because you treated us like equals, and you got us to treat each other like equals. We will never let ourselves forget that, so we will never ask to change the deal. Every wolf owes every fox a debt, and we pay that debt to our own fox by taking care of you. And I fucked up my share of the debt! But I won’t fuck it up this time.” “Why did you say ‘you’?” Tarkik asked. “I’m from Arctica. I wasn’t even alive when this happened.” “We have a photo ID that says you’re a fox of Foxia. For the next two weeks, you own a share of that obligation.” Tarkik had been right all along: Moon was reasonable. He felt that he owed a debt of honor, and he would pay it even if nobody was watching, and even if Tarkik didn’t respect Wolfoxia’s customs, he could respect that. He squatted down and pushed, and grunted, and after about a minute he stood up again. “Do you need a diaper change?” Moon asked. “No,” Tarkik said. “I seem to have constipated myself quite severely.”

Chapter 7 The wolf and fox in charge introduced themselves as both being named Frank, and gave a rundown of the plan for the next few weeks. The first step would be that everyone would embed in a high performing team in this office and observe how they go about their work. Because of the number of them and the number of available teams, they would be paired off. Petunia was paired with Moon and Tarkik, and they were told what conference room to go to for their team’s sprint kickoff. As an individual contributor, Tarkik had always hated sprint meetings. At the start of the week, everyone checks their email until it’s time for them to say what they plan to do that week, then every day you have a standup where everyone checks their email until it’s time to say what you got done so far, which is never as much as you planned to because of interruptions, and then at the end of the sprint the stuff you didn’t finish carried over to the next sprint. Aput had left in the middle of the previous sprint, so Tarkik kept having the meetings, but it wouldn’t surprise him if the team got more done than usual while he was at the summit because they had more time because of fewer meetings. He didn’t know if that would reflect poorly on him as a manager, or well if he took the hint. Tarkik, Moon, and Petunia arrived at their assigned conference room first. The chairs in this room were all wolf-sized. As the five wolf-and-fox members of the team arrived, the wolves sat in chairs, then lifted their foxes into their laps. The team managers were another wolf-and-fox, and Tarkik reflected that language typically evolves faster than organisms and there probably needed to be a linguistic construction for a single person consisting of two animals that’s different from regular plural. And then the managers explained why Tarkik, Moon, and Petunia were there, and then started the meeting, and it became abundantly clear that whatever they’d been doing back in Arctica, they weren’t sprints. First, nobody was checking their email. Moon had said that foxes don’t have their own phones here because they have nowhere to carry them, but the wolves weren’t using them either, and the only laptop in sight belonged to the managers. Second, the team members weren’t the ones planning what they were going to do. The managers gave an overview of the features the team would spend the sprint implementing, then broke them down into component parts: the protocol the client and server would use to communicate, changes to the database schema, whether the feature flags to enable it would be an on-off switch or a fraction of users, and then aspects of the user interface to the feature and how the server would store the data or communicate with other internal service. Team members would chime in with concerns about hard ordering constraints, then every member of the team would take a card from a special deck in secret—wolves and foxes had their own decks, and hid their choices from each other until it was time to reveal, though they pretty commonly came up with the same number—and revealed them all at the same time, then if there was a lot of disagreement they would have a discussion. It wasn’t clear what the numbers meant, and considering they were working in computers Tarkik was surprised they weren’t powers of 2. “They’re Fibonacci numbers,” Moon whispered during a brief pause after Tarkik asked him and Petunia about them. “If they used powers of 2, I guess you could only split a task in half, but this way you can split a 13 into an 8 and a 5.” That made some sense; also, Tarkik’s opinion of Moon rose even higher. If Sun hadn’t died, they probably would have been successful professionals, and it was a waste that the only work Moon could get without him was unskilled labor. The meeting continued until all the planned features had been voted on and assigned whatever the numbers meant, so of course there was some diaper usage before that was finished. The fox manager shat himself unstealthily before continuing the list of features, and Tarkik was almost certain a vixen team member had shifted in her bitch’s lap to make space to fill her diaper without it being squished against herself immediately. Also Tarkik wet himself, since that was inevitable. He was sure he could hear the hiss of his urine splashing against the thin inner layer of plastic behind the fake cloth cover of the diaper, which meant Petunia, closer to his crotch with more sensitive ears, must have heard it as well. Strangely, when he finished he heard some kind of buzzing noise from her, like her phone was giving a notification while in silent mode, but slightly longer than you’d expect. It stopped soon after; maybe it was two chat messages back to back. The meeting ended at around 11:30. The wolf manager and the bitch individual contributor near Tarkik offered the fox manager and the vixen in her lap diaper changes, plus a bottom-cumming and a pussy-eating respectively, which drew some surprise from Petunia. Tarkik pulled his phone from his laptop bag and checked his calendar app. The Franks had added him to the summit schedule, and he announced to Moon and Petunia that they were scheduled for a lunch break, which they should take with members of the team if possible; after lunch they’d observe the team working on the sprint items, again without participating. “Do you need your diaper changed?” Moon asked Tarkik. “I don’t know,” Tarkik said. “How do you not know?” Moon asked. “Well you said this morning my diaper had more room in it. It would be bad if I leaked, but I don’t want to waste time or diapers on unnecessary changes. How do I know if I need one?” “If you ask me to change you, I will,” Moon said. “But also, you pee like a wolf. You let it all out at once. Foxes let it out as soon as they have any.” “That’s probably because foxes here never learn to hold it because they know they’ll be in diapers their whole lives,” Tarkik said. “Probably,” Moon agreed, not realizing Tarkik meant to imply that was a bad thing. “So should we go to lunch?” Petunia asked. “Actually we have to find Animal Resources and make sure Moon’s getting paid for this.” “Okay,” Petunia said. “Try to find us later.” As she walked away with some members of the team who didn’t need to give or receive diaper changes, Tarkik was sure he heard the buzzing noise again. Tarkik looked up where Animal Resources was in the company directory on his phone, then went to the elevators and pressed the up button. When it arrived, he pressed the button for the eighth floor. “Hold it!” yelled Arturo, sprinting for the elevator. Tarkik managed to hit the door open button in time, and Arturo reached for the eighth floor button as well before finding it was already pressed. “You’re headed to Animal Resources too, huh?” he asked as the elevator started moving. “Yeah, I might have a way out of this Performance Improvement Plan for all of us. I walked into a washroom, and Frank the fox was on the diaper changing table, and Frank the wolf was fucking him in the ass!” “You’ve taken manager training, right?” asked Tarkik. “You should know that’s inappropriate language for the workplace.” “What would you call it?” Arturo retorted. “Frank was cumming Frank’s bottom?” Tarkik offered. “That sounds like how you’d explain it to children,” Arturo said. “That was how they explained it to us as children,” Moon said. “Long before we were able to do it ourselves, of course, but we needed to understand what we were seeing.” “You think sodomy is appropriate for the workplace?” Arturo asked as the elevator door opened and they all stepped out. “I don’t,” Tarkik said, “but they do. You might be about to complain about anal sex during a diaper change to someone who just had anal sex during a diaper change.” Arturo looked at Tarkik in his wet diaper, then Moon. “This country is fucked up,” he said, pressing the down button on the elevator panel. It may have been an inappropriate way of saying it, but Tarkik didn’t disagree. Animal Resources had a take-a-number system, and there was nobody in line, so a wolf-and-fox were able to see Moon and Tarkik quickly in a small conference room where they could speak privately. “Customs assigned me a Temporary Wolf when I entered the country, so we need to get him added to the payroll for the two weeks I’ll be here.” “We don’t hire animals just because Customs tells us to,” the wolf said. “For that matter, Customs didn’t even tell us to, they told you.” “Yes, but I need to be here for my job, and if he’s not getting paid and isn’t allowed to be here then he won’t be, which is illegal for both of us,” Tarkik argued. “Which is why foxes and wolves from other countries are only asked to travel to Wolfoxia if it’s absolutely necessary,” the wolf replied as the fox watched silently, “and when they are, we send one of the other with them so we know we can trust who they’re bringing into the building with them.” “That actually makes less sense,” Tarkik said. “If I’d brought a wolf employee from Arctica, you’d pay him to be here doing nothing but looking after me instead of his regular job. And based on when my train left yesterday you won’t get one on today’s train, so if you want to send one from there, he’d get here tomorrow night, so I’d miss two days of my summit which might make the whole thing moot. Plus under Arctic law we both might be able to make a sexual harassment case, and not against each other.” “Again, only if absolutely necessary,” the wolf said. “The only higher travel restriction is we never send a doe rabbit to Arborea under any circumstances.” “What counts as ‘absolutely necessary’?” Tarkik asked. “My continued employment depending on it? Because if a snowshoe hare would have a chance to keep their job and an arctic fox wouldn’t, that’s species discrimination.” “We would make other arrangements in that case. He’s not doing anything else for you, is he? We can give someone a temp or contractor badge if it’s a disability accommodation, like a sign language interpreter, but changing their fox’s diaper is an inherent responsibility of a wolf. Like we don’t pay you to breathe.” “Is ‘not having a wolf’ a disability?” Tarkik asked. The wolf and fox looked at each other nervously. It wasn’t a physical disability, but Tarkik thought it might be considered a societal disability, and he definitely had it. “You know, your contractor thing is a great idea too, because I could just have him send me an invoice when I get back to Arctica and put it on my expense report. I’d have to look up how much you have to pay someone to change an adult’s diaper. I bet it’s a lot.” And he wouldn’t be afraid of wasting diapers if he did that, because they were going on the expense account too. “Does he have any other skills?” The fox asked finally. Moon wore an expression that said ‘no’. “When wolves and foxes were first paired up, they had to play around with the pairings a little, because, for example, there weren’t exactly the same number of architects, but if you paired one with a civil or structural engineer, they could still work together doing different aspects of the same job. Does he have a skill that could fit with you, even if it’s not as a manager?” “What were you studying before—” Tarkik caught himself before mentioning Sun. “Before you had to stop?” “Math,” Moon said. That was actually really useful. “Did you have to take any programming courses?” Tarkik asked. “We only finished the introductory one.” “Software Engineering intern?” Tarkik suggested to the pair from Animal Resources. “Not the most qualified candidate,” the wolf said. “He’s available on short notice for two weeks in the middle of the term and he doesn’t have a permanent fox,” Tarkik said. “He’s uniquely qualified.” The wolf and fox looked at each other in that known-each-other-their-whole-lives way, but it was clear that Tarkik had alternatives that were entirely justifiable and either worse legally or more expensive. Moon presented the temporary ID card and got his account info out of his banking app for the single direct deposit he would get, and he and Tarkik were sent on their way with instructions to stop off at badging before the end of the day. “Sorry I couldn’t get you a full share of my salary, but I think this is more than fair for what you’ll be doing,” Tarkik said as they waited for the elevator to the ground floor for lunch. “How much does a Software Engineering intern get paid a week?” Moon asked. When Tarkik told him, Moon fell to his knees and hugged him tightly. It didn’t seem like that much money to Tarkik compared to his salary as a manager, but for someone who couldn’t get any other steady job, it was life changing.

Chapter 6 There were several food stations in the cafe: a coffee bar, a grill for fresh fish, one serving Meatfruit as steaks and sausages, and one for truly vegetarian options; each was staffed by at least one wolf-and-fox pair. The wolves were dressed typically for foodservice workers, and the foxes wore aprons; one turned at one point and Tarkik saw that he was wearing only a diaper under the apron. The rule about what foxes were allowed to wear seemed to take into account that some jobs require certain clothes for safety; that exception probably also applied to the customs agents, which is why they could wear their ID cards on lanyards. He decided he should get a lanyard for his work ID so he wouldn’t need to bring the laptop case everywhere, but that could probably wait. As the tray Moon carried accumulated a pair of oat milk lattes in their respective sizes, plus a similarly proportional pair of grilled fish fillets and fruit salads, he started looking around in a way Tarkik recognized from other guests he’d seen visiting the company cafe. “There’s no cashier,” Tarkik assured him. “It’s an employee perk. And if it wasn’t, I’d put you on my expense account.” “Is there a limit?” Moon asked. “To the expense account? It has to be legitimate, but my mandatory chaperone definitely is.” “No, to the free food!” “Oh! I guess they’d rather you didn’t waste any,” Tarkik said. Moon returned to the fish station and asked for two more of each size on their existing plates, and the servers happily obliged. “I don’t think I can eat three,” Tarkik said as they went to the seating area, full of long tables with pairs of low chairs for wolves next to high chairs for foxes. “I’ll eat whatever you don’t,” Moon said. “It’s been a bad month. I’ve been rationing.” That certainly cast the empty pizza boxes in a bad light, since it meant they were probably older than they seemed. Tarkik suggested they take seats at the end of a long table near the kitchen, and they sat down and started eating. Moon had more to eat, so Tarkik took a moment to check the calendar app on his phone. His former manager had forwarded the rough schedule for the summit to him on his last day, but it didn’t have room names, and he had expected more detailed events to be added to his calendar by now, but they hadn’t been. He put the phone away and ate one of the fish slowly as he kept an eye out, and eventually he saw what he was looking for: a non-wolf, non-fox who seemed shocked by what was going on. In this case, it was an agouti rabbit in a pocket dress with her plate piled high with greens. “Are you here for the summit?” Tarkik asked her. “Are you?” the rabbit asked. “Because you look very, um, local.” Suddenly a fresh wave of embarrassment crashed over Tarkik—he realized he hadn’t felt any for a little while because he’d just been one diapered fox among many, and nobody had thought anything of it until this rabbit thought of him as the one fox who shouldn’t be wearing a diaper. Embarrassment requires that your ass be bare in front of someone, so to speak, and that in turn requires that they not be just as bare. “I think I look very non-local,” Tarkik said, trying to save face, “but rules are rules.” The rabbit stretched up to put her plate on the table across from Moon and Tarkik, then hopped up to one of the high chairs and sat down. Her name was Petunia, and she was from the Arborea office. Eventually they were joined by a hyena named Colin and a puma named Arturo, who was a bit big for even the wolf-sized chairs. Tarkik had achieved his goal: by finding others who were here for the same summit, he now had several someones he could follow to the summit kickoff, where he’d get the whole calendar situation sorted out. And maybe he was back to feeling embarrassed about the diaper, but he tried to relax by observing that the other attendees were at least as embarrassed to be surrounded by diaper-wearers. As with the black coffee earlier, the latte soon gave Tarkik the urge to poop, but if there was ever a good time to have Moon change his soiled diaper (and there wasn’t), it wasn’t now, since he could ill afford to lose track of Petunia and the others. He clenched it in again, and as nine o’clock approached, he was still clenching a bit as they all dismounted their various seats, dropped their trays off at the dish room, and took the elevator to the third floor. They entered a large conference room with a large table in the middle and many animals of different species leaning against the walls around it; in all there were about twenty. As the only fox in the room, and therefore the only one wearing a diaper as far as anyone and everyone could tell, the embarrassment welled up again, but Tarkik fought through it and tried to project confidence; Moon certainly couldn’t since he legitimately felt like he didn’t belong there. At the stroke of nine, a wolf and fox entered from another door. The wolf carried a tablet in addition to the diaper bag slung over his shoulder, and the fox as usual wore a diaper and nothing else. “Good morning, everyone,” the wolf said. “I’m just taking attendance here really quickly, and then we can get started.” He seemed to have photos for the expected attendees on his tablet, since he never called a name, rather looking around the room and tapping on the tablet. Eventually he said, “We seem to be missing Aput Sukkajukkut. Did anyone see a snowshoe hare at the cafe? Is he on his way?” Tarkik raised his paw, and when Moon noticed he raised one paw and pointed a finger on the other down at Tarkik. “Yes, can I help you?” the wolf asked Tarkik. “Aput left the company a week and a half ago,” Tarkik said. “I took over as manager of his team, so I’m attending in his place. Tarkik Tiqriganiannig, and my temporary wolf Moon.” The wolf and fox in charge looked at each other in concern. “I think we need to speak to just you outside,” the fox said. “Everyone else, please be patient for a moment.” The wolf and fox went to the door they had entered through and the wolf held it open, and Tarkik sidled around the other attendees toward the door with Moon close behind. After letting the fox in charge and Tarkik out, the wolf tried to close the door before Moon could follow, but Moon stopped the door from closing with his arm. “What are you doing to my wolf?” Tarkik asked as he symbolically tried to open the door to let Moon through, since physically he wasn’t strong enough to counteract the wolf. “He has a guest badge, so he definitely doesn’t belong in that room, but he’s also not part of this conversation,” the fox said. “Nobody told me the punishment for a fox becoming separated from their wolf, but since I’m a foreigner I assume it’s deportation or worse,” Tarkik said, “If it was somebody else’s fault, would they be the one to face punishment?” The wolf and fox looked at each other as Moon retrieved the temporary ID from the diaper bag and held it out for inspection. They didn’t bother to look at it; they just opened the door to let him rejoin Tarkik. “What made you think you were supposed to be here?” the fox asked Tarkik. “My former manager sent me the details of this summit on his last day, so I updated all his reservations to my name,” Tarkik replied. “I need you to understand that your continued employment at this company depends on you being discreet with this following information,” the fox said, “which is also why I think the non-employee shouldn’t be here, but because you’re a fox I suppose we don’t have a choice on that matter.” “I just finished manager training, so I understand there are things that I have to keep confidential,” Tarkik said. “Okay,” the wolf said. “This isn’t a summit for whoever happens to be the manager of certain teams, it’s for specific low-performing managers. It sounds like Aput decided to seek other opportunities instead of continuing on his Performance Improvement Plan, but that doesn’t mean you need to be here.” “Obviously that gives you some insight into the employment status of everyone else in that room which you’re not supposed to have,” the fox added. And suddenly Tarkik had his iron clad excuse for cutting this trip short and spending the next two weeks at home with his wife and daughters instead of having Moon change his diapers. His train home a week Saturday left at ten, and if that was the time the train left every day then there was even a chance he could catch that train that day and be home that evening, and he’d never have to poop the diaper he was wearing, or if he was lucky, wear one ever again. All he had to do was take two weeks of Software Engineering Manager salary out of Moon’s pocket and leave him alone again. At least he got a meal in exchange for his subway fare. He looked at Moon, whose expression didn’t betray his opinion on the matter, and came to a conclusion. “I was an individual contributor on Aput’s team before he left, so if that team was underperforming, then I was part of the problem,” he said. “And I have no managerial style of my own yet. I planned to continue the same way Aput did, so if he was low-performing, then I was about to be. I’d rather be in that room now fixing the problem before it starts then have you drag me back here in a few months with my job on the line.” The fox and wolf looked at each other and seemed to be communicating with their expressions in the way two animals who have known each other for years can do. Also a small yellow patch appeared on the front of the fox’s diaper, which didn’t seem to be related to the wordless conversation, it was just that the fox wasn’t toilet trained, like every other fox in the country. And eventually the wolf opened the door and said, “if that’s what you want.” Tarkik and Moon entered the room, and the wolf and fox followed and closed the door behind them.

Background: Main character (MC) has a single father. He has to go on an overseas business trip at the start of summer where he can't take MC with him, so he calls MC's Best Friend(BF)'s parents to see if MC can stay with them, and he'll pay all expenses. BF is going to summer camp--great, tell me which one and I'll send MC there too! BF's parents are reluctant, but tell him which one, and MC's dad signs him up, no questions asked--who cares if it's expensive, MC will get to spend the summer with BF. Story picks up on the bus on the way to the camp. BF is super excited MC is going to the same camp, until he finds out MC doesn't know anything about the camp except that BF is going there. When they arrive, BF is super nervous when they go to their cabin, which is full of cribs and a changing table. The counselor for the cabin asks everyone to line up for diaper changes, and without hesitation BF joins the line.

Chapter 5 Moon was finishing his coffee when a phone alarm went off. Tarkik had left his phone’s alarm on the default tone, so he wasn’t sure whose it was, but Moon left the room to deal with it. “What time is it?” Tarkik asked when Moon returned. “Seven,” Moon said. “Okay, good. I wanted to get an early start.” “Dropping your bag and my clothes off at the hotel room, right?” “Not just that. I don’t know if my company will expect me to have a Temporary Wolf since they didn’t tell me about any of this, but they’ll need to know about you so they can get your photo for security,” Tarkik said. “And, uh, put you on the payroll,” he added. Moon raised an eyebrow at that, but of course if Tarkik and Moon were one legal person for the next two weeks then the company would have to pay them at the same rate as a local wolf-and-fox, and Moon would be owed his share of that, even if he wasn’t technically qualified for the role. “Do we have time for breakfast?” “They have food at the office.” Moon was impressed by that, even if it was standard for big tech companies, but if he was taking the kind of work you get by hanging around outside the hardware store, he wouldn’t be used to it. He left the kitchen for the bedroom, stopping off at the front door to collect the diaper bag since he needed to refill it. Tarkik considered asking to be taken with him before he realized that a diaper was all the clothing he was going to need for the day, so there was no reason to watch Moon get dressed. He considered letting himself out of the high chair, but the last thing he wanted to do was break his neck when he wouldn’t be allowed to go anywhere until Moon came back. As he thought that, he felt a churning in his bowels. Coffee did typically have the effect of making him need to poop, at least first thing in the morning. If he had considered the effect it would have on him, maybe he wouldn’t have asked for the diaper change just for being wet. Not that he would have pooped in the diaper, and it was a good thing he hadn’t because it seemed like Moon hadn’t bought wet wipes since Sun died, and the ones he had back then had dried out. Obviously foxes born here never get toilet trained, and getting their asses stretched out by wolf cocks can’t have helped their continence—he had noticed the male customs agents in the washroom at the train station hadn’t needed lube. And of course he couldn’t use a toilet in public, but surely he’d be able to talk Moon into letting him use one in private. But not now, when they needed to get out the door, and to the hotel, and then to the office. He clenched his sphincter, and by the time Moon returned to the room wearing some approximation of business casual (meaning he would probably be overdressed by his company’s standards) with a backpack and the diaper bag, the urge was mostly gone. “I charged your phone,” Moon said as he picked Tarkik out of the high chair and put him on the floor. “Foxes here don’t have their own phones because there’s nowhere to put them, so I can just keep it in the diaper bag.” “Actually, I do have somewhere to put it,” Tarkik said. He ran to the front door awkwardly because of the thickness between his legs, unzipped his rollaboard, and pulled out a slim laptop case, which he slung over his shoulder. It had a small outside pocket for the laptop’s charging cable and his work ID badge, which the phone would also fit in. He looked at Moon for permission. “It’s not clothes.” Moon followed Tarkik to the door and tightened the shoulder strap on the laptop case so there was no way it could cover any part of Tarkik’s diaper. “If the cops ask, it’s for work—” “It is for work,” Tarkik confirmed. “—but they might still want me to carry it.” He took Tarkik’s phone from the diaper bag and gave it to him, and Tarkik swung the bag around to the front to put the phone in the pocket before returning it to his back, ready to face the day. Okay, he was not at all ready to face the day because he would be facing it wearing nothing but a diaper, but he didn’t have much of a choice about that, so he zipped the rollaboard back up and tried to fake it as they left the apartment for the corridor and Moon locked the door behind them. Tarkik realized immediately that they hadn’t washed the coffee cups or emptied the filter of the coffee maker. The streets were fairly empty at this hour. They did pass a wolf and fox mother with a side-by-side stroller. In each seat a wolf cub sat with a fox kit between their legs. Both mothers seemed to have a diaper bag over their shoulder, and Tarkik assumed the wolf mother’s was for the fox mother, and the fox mother’s was for the babies. On the way into the subway station, they passed a wolf and fox cop, and Moon looked at them nervously. They looked back, but seemed uninterested in them and continued their watch. “Worried about the laptop bag?” Tarkik asked. “Cops always give me a hard time about where my fox is,” Moon replied. The subway wasn’t crowded, so Tarkik could sit on Moon’s lap instead of them needing to cling to an overhead strap. Tarkik appreciated that for all Moon’s offers of buttom-cumming, he didn’t get an erection when Tarkik was sitting directly on his penis. The situation was awkward enough for Tarkik as it was, although he tried to imagine himself wearing a swimsuit instead, a situation where his body would be equally exposed but he would not be embarrassed. It didn’t work. The Ferreot had put them in a room with a queen-sized bed, a crib, and a changing table, which was generously stocked with a few diapers and a portable package of wet wipes. They left Tarkik’s rollaboard and Moon’s backpack on the desk in the room. Moon stashed the package of wet wipes in his diaper bag. Tarkik gave Moon the address of his company’s office, which was about a block from the Ferreot, and Moon took care of navigation. There was a female wolf and fox behind the reception desk when they arrived, and nobody else needed their help, so they got both of their attention. “Hello,” Tarkik said, pulling his company ID badge from the pocket of his laptop bag and presenting it to the fox. “I’m here for a summit.” The fox took the badge and scanned it at a reader behind the desk. “The thing is, they assigned me a Temporary Wolf at the train station,” at which point Moon presented the card the customs agents had given them, “so he needs to sign the non-disclosure agreement and get added to payroll.” The fox started navigating some menus on the computer with a confused face while the wolf paid full attention. “I think there was a way to split direct deposit between multiple accounts, but it will have to go back to one account after two weeks when I go back home.” “Okay, so this is weird, but we weren’t expecting you to be here,” the fox said. “Now, you obviously work for the company, and you are here, so your badge will work on any doors that don’t have special access restrictions, same as if you visited while on vacation. Also, I’ve never heard of a Temporary Wolf, and these,” she held up the card from customs, “don’t normally have an expiry date. Now, it does appear to be official, so I guess I can believe that’s something they would do. For the payroll and such—” “Animal Resources normally doesn’t come in until nine,” the wolf interrupted. “I think that’s when the summit schedule starts,” Tarkik said. “So what we can do is register him as your guest. He’ll still have to sign an NDA, he’s your wolf so he’s obviously going to be in your presence at all times, and when there’s a break in your summit schedule you can swing by AR and deal with the money situation.” “In the meantime, the cafe is on the second floor,” the wolf added helpfully. The wolf took Tarkik’s badge and scanned it on a reader on a touchscreen, which displayed a name entry page. While Tarkik took the badge back, Moon typed in his name, then fastidiously read the agreement on the next page before using his claw to sign it. A printer attached to the touchscreen produced a little paper nametag, and Moon took a plastic clip from a bin next to the touchscreen and used it to attach the tag to his shirt pocket. The fox returned the temporary ID card to Moon, and Tarkik led him to the inner door and scanned his badge on the reader next to it, which beeped cheerfully. A magnetic lock released loudly, and Tarkik pulled the door open and held it for Moon, before they walked side by side toward the elevator. “Why wouldn’t they be expecting you?” Moon asked as they rode the elevator up a floor. “I don’t know,” Tarkik said, clipping his ID badge to the shoulder strap of his laptop bag, since that seemed preferable to attaching it to his diaper. “My current manager approved the expense report for the hotel and train when my old manager filed it. They should know the manager of my team would be coming, even if who that is has changed from when the report was approved.” The question gnawed at him, though.

Chapter 4 Moon left the room without saying anything more, abandoning Tarkik on the changing table with his penis exposed to the air. Tarkik wasn’t sure if that was breaking a rule, but to this point Moon had seemed like a stickler, so being in the same domicile was probably okay. That said, killing your fox probably wasn’t okay. After about ten seconds, he decided he should do something. He considered taping the diaper on himself, but it was clearly the wolf’s job to put those on. Not that he wanted to go looking for Moon in a diaper, but he didn’t want to go looking for him naked, either. Searching for his rollaboard and putting some underwear on was right out. But ultimately he figured he was allowed to be naked in the middle of a diaper change, and that’s where they were. He slid himself off the changing table, and the diaper under his bottom slid with him and fell on the floor behind him. He picked it up and left the bedroom for the hallway. The hallway floor was covered in empty cardboard shipping boxes and craft paper parcel envelopes. To the immediate right was a bathroom whose door was open, and Tarkik could see that Moon wasn’t in there, and that it was in as much need of cleaning as the rest of the apartment. He followed the short hallway to the left and reached a living area. The floor here was covered with more boxes and envelopes, plus used food containers and the bags they had been delivered in. The diaper bag and his rollaboard were on the bare patch at the front entrance where the door opened. There was a couch with badly worn cushions and a coffee table covered in empty soda cans. Beyond the living area was a tiled dining area which continued to the right behind a wall, probably to the kitchen. The small dinette was covered in pizza boxes. It had two normal chairs and two high chairs, and the normal chairs were covered in direct mail flyers, but not the high chairs. The tile floor was grungy, but at least walkable. Tarkik heard water running behind the wall, and continued into the kitchen, where Moon was filling the carafe of an automatic coffee maker from the sink. He turned off the tap and poured the water into the reservoir at the back of the coffee maker, then put the carafe on the heating element and switched the coffee maker on. “I thought we could use the table or the floor if you didn’t mind, but, uh,” Tarkik said, holding up the diaper for emphasis, then looking at the mess everywhere. “Do you want coffee?” Moon asked. “Sure, thanks,” Tarkik answered. “I only have oat milk. Is that okay?” “I just drink it black,” Tarkik said. Moon opened an overhead cupboard and pulled out a mug in his size, then reached for a much smaller one, stopped, and pounded his fist on the counter. “They wouldn’t have asked you to be my temporary wolf if you murdered your fox, right?" Tarkik asked. "So that’s not what you meant. Do you want to talk about what happened?” Moon reached back to the cupboard for the small mug. It was upside-down, so the bottom was covered in dust but the inside was safe; he rinsed it out in the sink anyway, then put it on the counter next to the larger mug. He looked at Tarkik, standing in the kitchen naked with an unfolded diaper in his paw. “I guess this place is dirty enough without you shitting on the floor,” he said. “I can hold it.” “You’re not supposed to hold it. You’re not supposed to need to hold it.” But nothing about whether he was allowed to. “The coffee will be a few minutes anyways.” He walked over to Tarkik and picked him up, one paw gently supporting his naked bottom and the other behind his back, and carried him back to the bedroom, carefully stepping around the boxes on the way. Moon placed Tarkik on the changing table, and Tarkik held the diaper out to him. “So what happened?” Moon took the diaper in one paw and lifted Tarkik’s bottom off the changing table by his feet with the other. “We’d just started college. Our parents got us a car so we could get around, visit on weekends.” He slid the diaper under Tarkik’s bottom and put him down on top of it. “I was driving—the wolf always drives. He was strapped into his car seat, but it didn’t matter. He was killed instantly.” “They said wolves whose foxes die usually ask to be euthanized,” Tarkik said as Moon stretched the front panel horizontally and covered Tarkik’s crotch with it. “I was in a coma for a month. Our parents wanted them to do it, so I would never have to know we were apart, but when you’re an adult you have to ask for yourself.” Moon taped one side of the diaper closed. “They put in a do-not-resuscitate order, but I never needed to be resuscitated.” Remembering what happened the last time he asked a sensitive question, Tarkik waited for Moon to finish taping up the other side before asking, “and you didn’t ask to have it done then?” “If I hadn’t been in the coma, I would have,” Moon said. “If I’d seen his body, I would have, but they’d already had him cremated. It’s not like I didn’t believe them, like I thought they were hiding him from me. But in a way it was like he didn’t die, he just vanished. I know that’s stupid. I have his cremains in my keychain, so we’re always together like we’re supposed to be. But it was also like, there were all these moments where it was just the two of us, and now I’m the only one who remembers them, so I have to do that. Maybe that’s silly.” “It’s not silly,” Tarkik said. Moon sat him up and did up the rear tape over his tail. “Were you drunk?” he asked. “I don’t mean that as an accusation. You’re old enough to drink, but I saw a lot of soda cans, not beers. Like maybe you swore it off.” “Not drunk, just careless. Reckless. Too fast for the weather.” He picked Tarkik up again with a paw under his bottom and the other around his shoulders. Tarkik clung gently to his chest fur. “I never started drinking. It was like time stopped when he died, or more like I stopped and the world kept moving. Like I’m nineteen forever, so there’s no future ahead of me. Our parents pay my rent, but it’s hard to talk to them when I killed half of their son, even if I am the other half. ” “Did they punish you? Not your parents, the police or whatever.” “There was an inquest. There always is when a fox dies and their wolf doesn’t, but it was obvious I didn’t do it on purpose, so I didn’t mess up the treaty. Besides, there’s no crime a wolf can commit where the punishment is they kill your fox. What more could they do to me? I mean, they made ads that said, ‘don’t drive drunk, you might kill your fox,’ even though I wasn’t drunk, but everyone who hears about it assumes I must have been. Nobody wants to hire a wolf without a fox anyways, so my reputation doesn’t matter. The best I can do is casual labor.” “What was his name?” “Sun.” “Sun and Moon. Orange and grey. Are paired names like that common here?” Moon reached the kitchen and put Tarkik in the high chair—Sun’s chair, he realized. That was why it was clean, unlike everything else. “Pretty common. The moms pick them at the same time. Sometimes the wolf and the fox have the same name, since you usually don’t need to talk to one and not the other. But a lot of them are just two names the moms like.” Moon left Tarkik in the chair and went to the coffee maker, which had made enough coffee that he could fill the two mugs from the carafe. “My name, Tarkik, means moon in the old Arctic language. I don’t speak much of it—they stopped making us take it in high school, but I know that much. I guess we have the same name, in a way.” “Yeah,” Moon said, not moved. He put the carafe back in on the heating element and opened the fridge for the oat milk, then changed his mind. He picked up the little coffee mug—Sun’s coffee mug—brought it to the table, and put it in front of Tarkik. Tarkik put his paw on Moon’s wrist before he could release the cup and take his paw away. “I’m glad you chose to stay,” Tarkik said. If Moon hadn’t been available, Tarkik wouldn’t be in a diaper and would be getting ready to board the train home to be with his wife and daughters with an iron-clad excuse for missing the business summit, but even if he believed that would be better, you would never tell someone that. And anyways, he didn’t believe it would have been better, as a matter of principle. Friend, stranger, or enemy, alive is better. No matter how much he hated it, he’d wear diapers a lot longer than two weeks if it meant someone could stay alive, even if they happened in the other order. “Yeah,” Moon said, still not moved. He went back to the fridge for the oat milk, poured it in his coffee and brought it to the table. He shoved the flyers off a chair so he’d have a place to sit. Neither of them said anything more until they had finished their coffees.

Chapter 3 The fox at the reception desk at the Ferreot (her wolf was beside her, but it only took one of them to check in each guest or pair thereof) was surprised to see a reservation for a fox traveling alone, but it being a corporate reservation with a guest name change seemed explanation enough for her. Luckily, in her words, they had a vacant room more appropriate for a wolf and fox than the one originally booked, and after Moon retrieved Tarkik’s corporate card from the wallet in the diaper bag and presented it to charge incidentals to, the reception fox gave them a key card, which Moon put in the same pocket of the diaper bag as the wallet. Of course they only needed one key card if they were expected to remain together. As they left the reception desk, Tarkik tried to walk to the elevators, and quickly arrived at the limit of his combined reach with Moon, who was headed toward the entrance. They looked at each other confused, before Tarkik stepped toward him and Moon crouched down. “Aren’t we going to the hotel room we just checked into?” “We had to check in tonight, or you’d lose the whole reservation but your company would still have to pay for it, right? Nobody told me you had a hotel booked. I didn’t bring any clothes for myself, or enough changing supplies for you. We’ll spend the night at my apartment and drop my clothes and your bag off in the morning before your work.” That seemed like a sensible plan to Tarkik; Moon wasn’t as old as him, but he seemed to have a good head on his shoulders. His last sentence raised a concern in Tarkik’s head, though. “What about your job?” Moon’s expression got sad. “I’m a wolf without a fox. I can’t get a job.” Moon’s apartment was on the edge of town, which required a transfer to another subway line and about forty minutes of total travel time; apparently some of that had overlapped with the customs agent’s diaper change. By the time they got on the second train, Tarkik had two problems. First, he had to pee. He hadn’t used a toilet since the train, and while he obviously had to keep up appearances in public, Moon seemed reasonable and surely he could remove the diaper once they were in private, so he just needed to hang on until then. The second problem was that after a long day of travel, he was exhausted. Moon seemed to notice by how much weight he was supporting with his paw, and as the train thinned out, he lifted Tarkik by the armpits, sat in one of the seats, and placed Tarkik gently in his lap, then pinched the rollaboard between his feet and pulled it close to them. Tarkik appreciated the chance to relax, even if he was worried about this position as it related to the offers of anal sex between wolves and their foxes, but if Moon had an erection, Tarkik couldn’t feel it through his diaper. As he got more tired, he leaned against Moon’s chest. Before he knew it, he was asleep. Tarkik woke up in a crib with a thin blanket draped over him. He took a quick scan of the room. There was a queen sized bed in which Moon slept. The floor was covered in dirty laundry. Next to the crib was a diaper changing table. On the floor beside it was a half-empty package of size 8 disposable diapers. He remembered the package design from when his daughters had been in diapers, and he was fairly sure the brand had changed it since then, so it had clearly been a while since it had been used. Light filtered through the blinds, by which he judged it was shortly after dawn. He couldn’t check for sure, because he was still wearing nothing but a diaper, and his phone had been put in the pocket of Moon’s diaper bag. He looked up at the rail of the crib, which had been raised. It was the same size crib a wolf cub would use, which meant the spring-loaded bolts on either side of the rail were far enough apart for an adult wolf to reach, but not an adult fox. Still, he stood up and tried to wedge one of the bolts open so he could sidle to the other side and open that too, but when he tried it the first bolt sprang back into place with a loud thunk, stirring Moon awake. Moon scratched behind his ear and rolled out of bed. He was wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts, but at least he wore those. He walked across the dirty laundry strewn across the floor as though it wasn’t there until he reached the crib. “Do you need your diaper changed?” “No, thank you,” Tarkik replied. “Yeah, there’s probably room for you to use it again. I’ll go make coffee.” He started toward the bedroom door as Tarkik pondered his use of the word “again”. He didn’t need to pee again. Then he realized he didn’t need to pee at all. He had needed to the night before. He patted the crotch of his diaper, and it was thick and mushy. He had been so exhausted that he wet himself in his sleep. “Actually I do need you to change my diaper,” Tarkik said. He didn’t want that, but they were going to his office, which meant going out in public, which meant keeping up appearances. Moon returned and lowered the rail of the crib, then put one paw beneath the seat of Tarkik’s diaper and the other arm under his armpit and around his back, and lifted him against his chest. “Would you like your bottom cummed?” he asked. “No,” Tarkik said as Moon carried him toward the changing table, “and you don’t need to ask me that. The answer will always be no.” “Why?” Moon asked, undoing the tape above Tarkik’s tail while walking. “I have a wife,” Tarkik replied. Moon placed Tarkik on his back on the changing table. “What does that have to do with it?” he asked. Tarkik remembered the wolf and fox on the subway the night before who decided to try to have vaginal sex with their wives instead of anal sex with each other. Apparently both options were compatible with marriage here. “Where I’m from, being married means not having sex with someone else.” Moon undid the tapes on Tarkik’s diaper and pulled the front down, exposing his penis to the room. “Legally, we’re not someone else from each other for the next two weeks,” he argued. “My wife isn’t from here, and I don’t think she’d see it that way,” Tarkik insisted. “And anyways, I don’t want to.” Moon shrugged, took a wipe that was supposed to be wet from a tub on the changing table, noticed it was dry, shrugged, and in spite of its dryness tried to use it to clean the fur of Tarkik’s crotch where it had been sitting in the used diaper all night. Tarkik felt an unwelcome erection growing, and Moon saw it immediately. “Do you want me to give you a paw job, or suck you off?” He asked. “No, just a basic diaper change, please,” Tarkik said, shocked at himself that he was asking for even that. Moon shrugged, put the used wipe on the wet padding of the diaper, lifted Tarkik off it by his ankles, slid the diaper out from under him, and rolled it up for disposal. As he reached down to the package of diapers on the floor, Tarkik felt like he needed to offer a simplification of their situation. “So, uh, wolves get potty trained, obviously. Which means they must make training pants, right? The disposable kind?” “Yeah,” Moon said, pulling a diaper out of the package. “Well those are just slightly differently-shaped diapers, right? And wolves can wet the bed, can’t they?” Moon started unfolding the diaper. “One of my daughters wet the bed for a while—they’re both from the same litter, but only one wet the bed. Isn’t that weird? Anyways, we got her those absorbent nighttime underwear, but that’s what they call them so kids don’t feel self conscious.” Moon lifted Tarkik by the ankles and slid the diaper under him. “They’re really just diapers, right? Like, all us adults know they’re diapers.” “I guess,” Moon said, lowering Tarkik onto the rear panel of the diaper. “So legally I could wear those instead of the tape-on kind, right?” “Would you try to use the toilet?” Moon asked as he stretched the front panel of the diaper horizontally, then pulled it over Tarkik’s crotch. Of course if he said yes, Moon wouldn’t get them for him, and if he said no, he’d be lying, so he decided to change the subject again. “So what happened to your fox, anyways?” Moon was in the middle of fastening the first tape, and at the question he let go of the tape and the front panel, which flopped open, airing Tarkik’s penis to the room again. He stepped back, closed his eyes, and leaned against the edge of the changing table. After he gathered himself for a moment, he looked Tarkik straight in the eyes. “I killed him,” he said.

Chapter 2 Moon carried his own bag over his shoulder, dragged Tarkik’s rollaboard behind him in his left paw, and held on to Tarkik’s paw firmly with his right, which meant Tarkik had to open the door to the washroom where he would be changed into a diaper. The female customs agents had matter-of-factly dismissed his brief tantrum on the topic, since he could scarcely be surprised by it after an hour in the train station. It was different for them though: they had known each other their entire lives. The washroom had two changing tables in it, and both were in use by male customs officers, based on the uniforms the wolves wore. On one table, the wolf was using wipes to clean runny feces off his fox’s bottom and dropping the used ones on the soiled diaper under the fox’s buttocks. On the other changing table, the wolf’s cock was balls deep in the fox’s ass. The front panel of a wet diaper dangled over the edge of the changing table, held in place by the fox's weight pressed on the diaper’s rear panel and by the tape above his tail; the diaper flapped back and forth with each thrust by the wolf, the absorbent material broken apart by the movement and clumped up at the bottom. Tarkik was not particularly interested in watching either, so he turned away, toward Moon who stood closer to the door. “Take off your clothes,” Moon said. Tarkik averted his gaze, and Moon crouched down and let go of Tarkik's paw so he could grab his snout firmly and turn it toward him. “Foxes are not allowed to wear clothes,” Moon hissed. “Take off your clothes, or we will ruin it for everyone.” It has been pretty clear in Tarkik’s mind that there would be consequences for him for not following the rules, and therefore after performing some perfunctory resistance, he was going to end up wearing a diaper and nothing else. He was surprised by the idea that his refusal might ruin anything for anyone, let alone everyone, but Moon seemed very serious, and he couldn't imagine the consequences for his employment if he somehow destroyed the nation of Wolfoxia on the first night of his business trip. He pulled his shirt over his head and gave it to Moon, who opened Tarkik’s rollaboard and tossed the shirt roughly into it. He heard the bum-wiping wolf lift his fox off the dirty diaper by his ankles and slide the diaper out, then roll it up and discard it. At the same time, the ass-fucking wolf murred, and the rhythmic crinkling of the swinging diaper slowed; it didn't take much imagination to guess he had achieved orgasm. Tarkik took his wallet, passport, and phone from his pockets separately, and while Moon stashed those in pockets of his shoulder bag, Tarkik unbuttoned his pants, pulled them down, and stepped out of them, leaving him wearing only his Y-front briefs. Moon stared at Tarkik, and Tarkik turned to the changing tables where the bum-wiping wolf, having placed a clean diaper under his fox, had unzipped his pants and was now fucking him roughly in the ass. Meanwhile, the formerly ass-fucking wolf cleaned his penis with one wet wipe, then used another to mop his fox’s semen out of the fur of his belly. Tarkik looked back at Moon and tried to say with his eyes that there was no point in taking off his underwear yet because it would be a while before they could use one of the changing tables. But for as young as Moon seemed to be—low to mid twenties, and thus nearly a decade younger than Tarkik—he shot back a look that said, “You can’t actually be this stupid.” Tarkik knew that look. He had only recently become a software engineering manager, and he’d already given that look. He took a deep breath and slipped his underwear off, and Moon put them and the pants into the rollaboard, then zipped it closed. The wolf whose fox’s diaper had only been wet removed that diaper, rolled it up, threw it away, then took a clean diaper from his shoulder bag—it was a diaper bag! Of course they all had diaper bags!—and taped it on his fox with a practiced paw. He zipped his own fly shut, then lifted the fox up by the armpits, heaved him just enough in the air to get a paw under the seat of his diaper, and lowered him to the ground. They exited the washroom paw-in-paw, paying Tarkik a brief glance that seemed to be more about the color of his fur than his nakedness. Moon picked Tarkik up by his armpits, carried him over to the changing table, and laid him on it on his back, leaving the rollaboard near the door. Tarkik now had a better view of the anal sex happening on the other changing table, and while curiosity drew his gaze briefly, he had no idea what the etiquette regarding it was, and he assumed it couldn’t be rude not to watch, so he looked at Moon instead. “Would you like your bottom cummed?” Moon asked him. “No, thank you,” Tarkik replied. Moon looked like when someone asks you a question when you’re about to back your car out of your driveway and you have to manually step through a process you’re used to following by muscle memory. As he zipped open the large pocket on his diaper bag, Tarkik saw out of the corner of his eye that the fox getting his ass pounded on the changing table next to him looked over briefly in confusion. The wolf sodomizing him kept his eyes on his fox, and after a few thrusts the fox caught his gaze again. Moon removed a disposable diaper from his diaper bag, unfolded the front and rear panels, then grabbed both of Tarkik’s ankles with one paw and lifted his bottom off the changing table, sliding the diaper under it with the other, carefully aligning the slit at the back with his tail, and lowering him onto the rear panel. The softness of the absorbent padding now under him was preferable to Tarkik over the hard plastic of the changing table, still warm from the other fox’s buttocks, but that was a waypoint toward a destination he was not eager to arrive at. Moon pulled the front panel of the diaper over Tarkik’s penis, ensuring he got the elastic leg cuffs deep in the wells between Tarkik’s thigh and crotch. He held the front in place with one paw as he did up one of the two front tapes, as this was a true baby diaper with one tape per side and not a small adult diaper as Tarkik was fairly sure was available in Arctica but had never had the need for, then repeated the process on the other side. Finally, he sat Tarkik up and fastened the single tape at the top of the tail slit, ensuring no amount of the kind of weight Tarkik had no intention of adding to it would pull the back of the diaper down. On the table next to them, the fox ejaculated onto his own belly, and a moment later the wolf slowed his thrusts and got a glassy, joyful look in his eyes. Moon lifted Tarkik by the armpits again, placed him on his feet on the ground, then took his right paw firmly with his left. “I’ll take you to my apartment,” Moon said as he led Tarkik toward the washroom door at what for him was surely an annoyingly slow walking pace. “My company reserved a hotel room for me,” Tarkik said. “The Ferreot near Union Square.” Union Square was two stops by subway from the international train terminal, and if it had been Tarkik’s first introduction to the nation instead of waiting for nearly an hour before being forced into a diaper while watching two wolves sodomize foxes during diaper changes, he would have been quite impressed. The entire station was spotlessly clean, and the fare gates were barrierless and wide enough for a wolf and fox to walk through side by side. Moon didn't need to buy a ticket or present a fare card, but Tarkik assumed the ride wasn't free or there would be no point in having the fare gate, so it must have either recognized his face or read his card from inside his pocket. It was late on a Sunday evening, so the subway train was crowded but not packed. Unlike the international train, the seats were only at a single height, with the convention being that the wolf would sit in the seat and their fox would sit on their lap. The seats were full, mostly with residents returning from their weekend plans, so Moon held onto an overhead ring and Tarkik held his paw, as the foxes of the other straphangers did. This left Moon without a paw to hold Tarkik’s rollaboard with, so Tarkik kept a paw on it to stop it from rolling away when the train moved. Tarkik would have preferred not to look at anyone's diaper, but he was surrounded by foxes of both sexes wearing nothing else and none of them seemed ashamed of it. It would be silly to try to preserve dignity they didn't think they lacked, so he took an inventory of what they were wearing. First, nobody wore a fox-sized adult diaper—they were all baby diapers with side tape closures, mostly decorated with licensed characters. Even those that were comparatively plain—store brand rather than name brand, perhaps—had a pastel colorway on the tape panel. Second, at least half were some degree of wet. One of the more common brands had a wetness indicator, but even those that didn't showed obvious swelling, or yellowing of whatever part of the crotch was naturally white. Third, not everyone in the country was part of this wolf-fox dichotomy. A grey-furred doe rabbit sat in a seat, which was a bit high off the ground for her but easier to use than the hanging rings. She was dressed casually (but most importantly, at all), and not accompanied by someone wearing only a diaper. Perhaps she was on vacation, as the caribou sitting next to him on the international train said he was, but she seemed to take everything around her in stride. Next to Tarkik, a male fox holding his wolf’s paw crouched down and made farting noises as the seat of his diaper bulged out. “Do you need your diaper changed?” his wolf asked him when he was finished. “Yes, please,” the fox answered. “Would you like your bottom cummed?” the wolf asked. “Actually I thought we might cum our wives’ pussies tonight.” “Then I’ll wait to change you until we get home,” the wolf concluded. The fox seemed to find this acceptable and stood around with his mess weighing down the back of his diaper. Tarkik made eye contact with the rabbit and raised an eyebrow, hoping to convey, “do you believe this?” The rabbit seemed to recognize by his fur that he wasn't from around here, even if his underwear and chaperone were those of a local, and shrugged back, which he interpreted as, “it is what it is.” Thankfully Moon and Tarkik’s stop came before he could smell the load in the adjacent fox’s diaper, and as they left the train with Moon once again dragging the rollaboard, Tarkik mentally wished the fox and wolf luck with convincing their wives to have sex with them—for all he knew, the fox’s wife also had a dirty diaper and wouldn’t be turned off by her husband’s. Or perhaps the bitch and vixen were both the wife of both the male wolf and fox, and it was ignorant of him to assume the sexual split would be by species. Although the fox husband with the wolf wife might not be a satisfying combination for either party, but there were solutions to that problem, and imagining the solutions gave him an erection in his diaper. He sped up his walking pace in an effort to suppress it, even though he didn’t know which exit led to the Ferreot. Moon picked up on his faster pace and sped up as well, without knowing why. This country seemed determined to make Tarkik unfaithful to his wife. One more reason to hate it.

Quick preamble: I was reading a story on Sofurry called Dedicated Diaperbitch (https://sofurry.com/s/pnGpANg1) in which a male wolf takes his slightly younger diaper-loving fox boyfriend to an orgy with three other male wolves where the fox becomes part of the pack by letting them all have sex with him. At one point, one of the other wolves mentions, "treating his pet well," and I thought, "Wait, does every wolf in this country have a diapered fuck-fox?" On further reflection, the other wolf's pet wasn't necessarily diapered, but anyways, it inspired me to make a story about a country where every wolf has a diapered fuck-fox, and somehow that situation isn't completely terrible. (Although if you're a fox who's just visiting...) Chapter 1 “And where's your wolf?” The vixen customs official asked. Tarkik considered himself a faithful fox. He was a heterosexual male, but he could appreciate the beauty of a vixen, even a red fox like this one and not an arctic fox like himself, without being tempted into infidelity against his wife and their two kits. He was, however, having trouble processing what the customs official had said because she was wearing a lanyard around her neck with her ID card attached, a disposable baby diaper that was quite visibly wet, and absolutely nothing else. “I'm sorry, what was that?” He asked. “As a fox, you're legally half a person,” the mostly-naked customs officer said. “The other half of your person is your wolf, who must accompany you at all times. I can't let you through without your wolf. Where is he?” There had been two seats on each side of the aisle of the train he had just arrived on, one large and one small. Tarkik had sat in one of the small ones and a caribou had taken the large one. In every other pair of seats, the small one had been occupied by a red fox and the large one by a wolf. He hadn't found anything suspicious about that at the time. He looked back at the line of travelers he was now holding up. Every fox was holding paws with a wolf of the same sex. Sometimes when the line stopped, a fox took the opportunity to remove all of their clothes until they were wearing only a disposable baby diaper before giving all the clothes to the wolf, who stashed them in a shoulder bag. Many of the foxes had already done this. Tarkik looked back at the customs officer, trying hard to focus on her face and not her diaper, or her exposed nipples. “I don't have one.” “Did you not research the laws of Wolfoxia before planning this trip?” She asked. “My former manager was supposed to come on this trip. He left the company on short notice and I was promoted into his position, so I inherited the trip.” “And he's neither a wolf nor a fox?” “He is a snowshoe hare.” The fully dressed wolf bitch in the same booth finished helping a wolf and fox combo at the window on the other side and came over to join Tarkik and the near-naked fox instead of beckoning another pair over. “So it's pretty obvious,” she said, “that when the constitution says, ‘fox,’ what it means is, ‘red fox who lived in the nation of Wolfia or Foxia, or the new nation resulting from their merger.’ But it doesn't say that, it says, ‘fox,’ and you're definitely a fox, and we have to enforce the law as written. How long is your business trip?” “Two weeks,” Tarkik answered. “That is technically long enough to make a federal case of it, but you might not have any time left for business, and it's really your company's responsibility since they sent you on the trip.” “So what should I do?” Tarkik asked. The topless vixen slid his passport back to him and pointed to a door. “Why don't you wait in the secondary inspection area while we process everyone else from the train, and we'll try to figure something out?” Tarkik took his passport and walked toward the door, dragging his rollaboard suitcase behind him, thankful it would give him a respite from looking at the vixen’s nudity. Tarkik laid on a bench in the secondary inspection room. He hadn't been able to reach anyone at his company by telephone and he didn't think he should call his wife and risk waking the girls when it would worry her without her being able to do anything, so he'd been trying to take a nap for about twenty minutes when the bitch and vixen entered. Changing the vixen's wet diaper had clearly not been a priority for them, which made Tarkik feel a little bit important. “We called your situation in to our head office, so if we're allowed to make an exception for you, they'll let us know,” the bitch said. “You're not in any trouble, but worst case, you'll have to sleep here and we'll send you home on the first train tomorrow.” “In the meantime,” the vixen continued, “you're probably curious about the wolf and fox thing.” “I'll be honest,” Tarkik replied, “I'm more curious why you're naked except for a diaper.” “It's the same reason,” the bitch said. “Okay, so a few decades ago, Wolfia was about to perform a sneak attack against Foxia. Foxian intelligence found out, and Foxia’s leaders contacted Wolfia’s military leadership and asked what it would take to end the war with no casualties.” “To be clear,” the vixen added, “Foxia had better technology. It thought it would win, but with many casualties on both sides. They wanted to know what those lives were paying for.” “Right,” the bitch continued. “Of course Wolfia thought it would win too, so the military leaders asked for everything. The first one figured they'd enslave every surviving fox, so they said, ‘Foxes will work for wolves.’ The second figured, ‘why not make the foxes sex slaves too?’ So they said, ‘Wolves can fuck foxes whenever they want.’ and the third... well, the best speculation is they wanted to humiliate the foxes, so they said, ‘Foxes will wear and use diapers, and they can't wear anything on top of them.’” “Presumably except for when they were being raped by wolves as part of proposal number two,“ the vixen interjected. “Oh, sure,” the bitch agreed. “I actually think the third wolf figured there was no way Foxia would accept the first two, so why not be absurd?” “I don't think any of them thought Foxia would accept, so they weren't careful with their wording,” the vixen said. “Obviously they weren't going to agree to what Wolfia meant, but what they did was announce to the surrounding countries, and they hacked Wolfia’s TV and radio stations to announce it there as well, that they had agreed to merge with Wolfia under some conditions Wolfia had proposed. First, foxes and wolves would be paired up by sex, as closely as possible by career and family, and the pairs would remain in each other's presence at all times.” “They had to avoid the foxes being sold, or trucked off to labor camps, or even left at home to do domestic labor,” the bitch chimed in. “It was possible a wolf would try to make their fox do their job, but would you hire a wolf to get their fox's labor when you could get a wolf and fox who would work together?” “Second, a fox is assumed to consent to sex with their wolf at all times,” the vixen continued. “You couldn't have wolves prostituting their foxes out,” the wolf explained. “They figured most wolves wouldn't actually want sex slaves, and most of the ones who did were heterosexual. Since the pairs would also be same sex, this meant the wolves could have sex with a fox whenever they wanted like the demand said, but they probably wouldn't, and the damage from the rapiest wolves would be limited.“ “And third,” the vixen concluded, “foxes would wear and use diapers, could not wear clothes on top of them, and it would be the responsibility of their wolf to change their diapers.” “That one was too specific to get around,” the bitch said, “but they were pretty sure whoever suggested it either didn't have kids or wasn't involved in raising them. Like, someone was going to have to change those diapers, and it was pretty obviously going to be wolves if they actually wanted it to get done.” “So they announced this like it was a done deal?” Tarkik asked. “Well they had a recording of the demands,” the bitch said, “so they could justify that they were satisfying them, but also, the other nations thought Foxia was insane to accept those terms. None of them, nor Wolfia's civilians for that matter, knew the sneak attack was being planned. Wolfia would look really bad for prosecuting an undeclared war against a nation that had agreed to be annexed under such unfavorable terms.” “And then Foxia countered the sneak attack without talking about it, and Wolfia couldn't admit they tried to go through with it and failed, so they just pretended the whole thing really was their idea in the first place,” the vixen said. “And you're not embarrassed to be naked except for the diapers?” Tarkik asked the vixen? “Why would I be?” She asked. Then she crouched down a few inches and scrunched up her face, and Tarkik heard the flump of her soiling her diaper. Then she stood up like nothing had happened. “Do you need your diaper changed?” The bitch asked her. “Yes, please,” the vixen replied. “Would you like your pussy ate?” The bitch asked. “Yes, please,” the vixen replied. “We're going to get her cleaned up,” the bitch told Tarkik as though he hadn't heard them candidly discussing the cunnilingus that was also going to take place. “We'll be back as soon as we hear something from head office.” As they walked out of the room, Tarkik watched the tail of the vixen swish back and forth. Below it, the lump of mess pulling down the seat of her diaper swished back and forth as well. He was not sure he wanted them to hear good news from their head office. They returned about fifteen minutes later with the vixen wearing a clean diaper. “Head office has come up with a solution,” the vixen said. “Normally when a fox dies, their wolf will ask to be euthanized, or vice versa. There is a male wolf in the city who didn't do that. Head office got in touch with him, and he’s agreed to be your Temporary Wolf for the next two weeks. He's on his way here now.” Tarkik was slightly concerned about whether his company's security would approve of a stranger accompanying him in the building, but he supposed anyone can sign a nondisclosure agreement. Suddenly he had a more worrying thought. “I don't have to let him have sex with me, do I?” He asked. “No,” the bitch said. “I mean, at your age, if you'd been paired at birth you would. It turned out that wolves and their foxes love having sex with each other, or at least ones that were paired at birth do, so they didn't need to assume consent, but there were legitimate reasons for a fox to say no, like having a perforated colon.” “He did survive,” the vixen added, “and his wolf was devastated to have hurt him just because he felt like he couldn’t say no.” “Anyways, the constitution was amended a few years ago so there's no assumption of consent between a wolf and their fox for new pairs after that date, and that would apply to you.” Tarkik was so relieved, he didn't think to ask the obvious other question about the situation. About half an hour after that, a lone wolf arrived carrying a shoulder bag like the one the other traveling wolves had been carrying. He introduced himself as Moon, but was otherwise quiet and withdrawn. There was a photo booth in the inspection area, and the customs officials took a photo of each of them and printed a temporary ID card that had both of their pictures on it. With that in paw, they were able to return to the customs booth in the now empty entry hall and Tarkik got his passport stamped for entry. “Welcome to Wolfoxia,” the bitch said. “Thank you,” Tarkik said, appreciative of their explanations and how late they had probably stayed on account of him. Now he was eager to check into his hotel. He was pretty sure the reservation was by the room, not the occupant, so it wouldn't be a problem for Moon to stay with him, though he hadn’t made the reservation so he didn’t know what the bed sizes were. “By the way,” the vixen said, interrupting his train of thought and pointing at a door, “there's a washroom over there where your wolf can change you into a diaper.”

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAPABAP///wAAACH5BAEKAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAICRAEAOw== If rabbits, foxes, and skunks are people, are cats and chickens too? That detail aside, it seems like it would be a nice enough story even without the diaper aspect, which possibly means you could cut it entirely, although it seems like you want to post it here. Since there would be concerns the fox would eat the rabbits (which might also be a concern with the skunk), how much do you want to make the animals like animals? I published a story here earlier this year called First Day at Rabbit School where a girl moves to Rabbit Island with her family because her father is the ambassador, only to discover when she attends the school that rabbits poop 200 times a day, so they all wear and use diapers and the concept of a toilet is foreign to them. I thought this would be a way to sneak diaper content into furry stories. Is that a direction you want to consider? Of course in a society where multiple anthropomorphic species and no humans exist, a rabbit's house might have a toilet for visitors or because it wasn't custom built. Rita could arrive at the house and be the only one using the toilet, while the rest of the family are unashamed of their diapers and change each other as necessary. Rita could ask to be diapered as the rest of the family are as a way of fitting in, instead of getting the idea from the treatment of someone else's baby.