Fridays were exhausting. They were the busiest, most mentally-draining day of the week, and by the time Walter was done cleaning up in the kitchen, he was ready to go collapse back into his seat to watch the rest of the endless news cycle. Occasionally, he’d drift off to sleep for a few minutes here or there, but he never stayed asleep for long. A particularly loud commercial break or a neighbor pulling into their driveway was often all it took to rouse him again. Sometimes he’d get up to move around, or scroll through Twitter to see opinions from the masses, but little seemed to hold his attention for long.

He napped off and on all night, until he’d seen everything the 24 hour news circuit had to offer and the sky started to brighten up as dawn approached. Saturday was the one day off Walter gave himself a week, and he didn’t feel like spending it inside. Getting up, Walter stretched his back and looked out the window at the sky. It looked like it was going to be wet and miserable, just like the day before with the city hidden beneath a layer of early morning mist and fog. Nothing new, then. But a good day for the gym, he decided. Walter went back to his bathroom to brush his teeth and change into something more appropriate for working out, and swapped out his glasses for contacts. By the time he made it back out to the living room, the sun was starting to rise somewhere in the cloud cover over the distant mountain beyond the city, lighting up the room with a grey-blue glow.

His gym shoes were downstairs by the garage door, along with his DCs he’d kicked off the second he’d stepped inside the previous evening. It took a few minutes to get into his gym shoes and do up the laces, careful not to snap them where they were starting to fray. Walter couldn’t tell if his claws were catching on the insides of his shoes because he needed to trim them, or if the insides of his shoes were just that worn down and gross. He probably needed a new pair. These ones were ancient and bordering on damaging. He thought maybe he’d get a new pair once the stores opened. But everything was closed in the early hours of the morning, so the shoes could wait. One more day in nasty old shoes wouldn’t kill him.

The 12-cylinder A8 in his garage was one of the few nice things Walter owned and cared about. Black and chrome, too big to be reasonable, and entirely too loud, it was the first new car he had ever bought. More than once on his drive out of the hills, Walter had to slow down to make sure the long car could make the twists and turns. It wasn’t a long drive, but the Audi was not exactly built for hilltop neighborhoods planned by nature. Walter had been avoiding the gym all month, but by this point, he’d learned the timing of these things. Most of the Resolutioners had given up and gone away, leaving the building blessedly quiet. Walter was looking forward to a few weeks of quiet, early morning work outs before spring came along, and all those Resolutioners came back desperately trying to lose 30 pounds before Spring Break. Walter hated going to the gym at the beginning of the year. But he was starting to go stir crazy, and needed to do something a little more productive than picking fights with guys twice his size in mechanic shops. Luckily, by now the crowds had thinned and lot parking was available when Walter pulled up to the building. Walking through the corner door, Walter found the gym empty enough that he had his pick of machines. He briefly thought about using one of the bags, since they were all open, but that wouldn’t do it. He needed to burn off energy in a bigger way, so he found a treadmill instead. He pulled his phone and headphones out of his pocket, found a good playlist, and started running. He wanted to go until he fell over, but he’d done that before, and he always regretted it. Something about having all the skin scraped off his knees and his tail getting stuck in the belt just wasn’t enjoyable. He’d go until he felt like he wanted to fall over. That was his plan, and he stuck to it with single-minded determination. Between the music in his ears, and the sound of the machine, and his own pounding heart and breathing, he was lost to anything happening around him. He might as well have been in his own little world. It wasn’t until a bright orange, one-pound dumbbell barely missed his shoulder and bounced off the wall in front of him that Walter realized suddenly that he wasn’t alone anymore. He barely managed to stay on his feet, and not fall over and scrape all the skin off his knees as he stopped the treadmill and turned around to see what the problem was this time. Seeing the problem, he still wasn’t sure what it was. Some dumb ferret throwing dumbbells for the hell of it, apparently. Walter picked up the one that was thrown at him, and was prepared to throw it back until some pissed off bull tackled the idiot at the racks. He tossed the weight back down to the floor and pulled his phone back out of his pocket to check the time. It was still pretty early, but after all that excitement, Walter decided it was time to go back home for a cup of coffee and to get cleaned up.

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Home, he found, was being circled by no fewer than three news choppers and a police helicopter. He pulled the car back into the garage, just to be safe, in case whatever the cops were there for came past his front door. He otherwise ignored the noise and kicked off his shoes toward the wall, and headed upstairs to start the coffee machine. With that going, he headed back to the bathroom to change out of his gym clothes and freshen himself up a bit, taking time to wash his face and clean up. He’d considered taking a proper shower, but he was neither in the mood to spend all day drying naturally, nor to mess around with a blow dryer for forty five minutes. Instead, he poured a generous amount of dry shampoo into his paw and rubbed it deep into his fur. It didn’t make him feel much better, but at least he’d be able to be out in public. Once he was in a pair of jeans, he took the gym clothes down to the washing machine in the garage. The noise and commotion was still going on above him by the time he’d got back up the stairs, and if anything, sounded louder. He stepped outside onto the front porch to get a better look, but the thing worth looking at wasn’t in the sky. A bit further along the hill, just a few houses over, the ground had given out entirely and slid down into one of the houses below.