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Dazai was late. That was nothing new, obviously; the bastard had a constitutional inability to be considerate of others. Not even the threat of his uptight new boss' disapproval would make him eager to pair up with Chuuya again, but apparently the unstable Gifted the Department had lost was dangerous enough to need Chuuya's personal brand of firepower to subdue. And since the Agency didn't trust the Port Mafia not to pull a fast one – which was fair enough – Chuuya had been pacing the fence at the rendezvous point for the past twenty minutes, waiting for his so-called partner to deign to show up.
Pivoting on his heel, Chuuya spun crisply atop the fence post, tail lashing behind him for balance. He hardly required it, given his iron grip on his own gravity, but why make the uncomfortable effort to hide his nonhuman features with no one around to see? The crumbling, vegetation-laced buildings of the abandoned high school loomed behind him against the night sky, blocking out what few stars were visible beyond the city lights.
The other advantage of relaxing his form was that it made a great outlet for the inevitable irritation that came alongside having to work with Dazai. Again. Chuuya's ears and tail were both puffed out to their maximum extent, even the hair on the back of his neck bristling, and a jumpy undercurrent of static crawled over his skin in mirror to the flux of his Ability beneath it.
And, of course, these ears were a hell of a lot more sensitive than his flat human ones. No unGifted person would have heard the soft tread that pricked Chuuya's ears, but he was whirling before the second foot could fall, exquisitely balanced atop the fence post.
"Typical Chuuya," Dazai said, but... "No one sneaks up on you, hm?"
Chuuya flicked his tail once, sharp, before darting down to the ground, fast enough that the litter of fallen leaves and weeds swirled with the shockwave of his landing. Dazai didn't so much as bat an eyelid, which wasn't a surprise. Chuuya squinted up into his sallow face, night vision giving him an unparalleled view of the deep shadows beneath Dazai's eyes as well as the tired lines around them. "What's wrong with you?" he demanded, bark-rough.
Dazai looked down his nose at him, putting on an affronted face that was too obviously a mask. "I see Chuuya's just as rude as ever, too. Can we get on with this little exercise so we can go our separate ways again?"
"Shut up." Chuuya rolled his eyes. He leaned in – up, though it galled him – to sniff experimentally at Dazai's collar. Like this, his nose was barely better than a sensitive human's, but the hint of fever sweat was obvious and telling. "You're sick," he said, rocking back onto his heels and folding his arms.
Dazai scrunched up his nose, derisive. "Chuuya's delusional. I never get sick."
Chuuya huffed out a sarcastic sigh. "Yeah? Tell me you don't feel like shit right now and I'll let it go."
Dazai narrowed his eyes. "I'm–" he began; Chuuya raised an eyebrow, interrupting him.
"And don't even think about trying to bullshit me, Mr I-don't-lie-in-negotiations."
Dazai's mouth snapped shut. He glared down his nose at Chuuya, silent.
"Yeah," Chuuya said, with finality. "Unless you're planning on sneezing on the mark to take 'em out, you better leave this shit to me."
“Hmph.” Dazai’s jaw was set. “Very well, then,” he said, thick-voiced. “Let’s get on with it.” He lifted his head, blinking around at the desolation.
On anyone else, Chuuya would have called that an animal instinct, part of the side effect of Abilities that brought their bearers a certain fluidity of form. Dazai, though, had no animal form to start with. According to him, at least, and most of the other Gifted he encountered seemed willing enough to believe it, given his particular Ability. Chuuya hadn't fallen for that at fifteen, though, and he sure as hell wasn't inclined to now.
Dazai scanned the whole area slowly, turning on his heel, then paused with his head tilted as if listening. Chuuya cocked his own head, pricking up his ears, but Dazai’s were either more sensitive or more attuned to subtle variations. He glanced over his shoulder at Chuuya, lifting a lazy hand to point toward one side of the school building. A quick flick of a gesture was as much of an order as any king’s decree, indicating a strategy they’d used before to good effect.
Chuuya gritted his teeth at the arrogance, but nodded sharply, cancelling his gravity and kicking off the ground to float over the fence. He could put up with Dazai’s idiot act for the length of one more job, anyway. Time to kick some asses.
🦊
By the time they had the wolf-eared woman with the reality-warping powers safely handed over to the Department, passed out cold from a well-timed gravity punch, Dazai was visibly drooping. Oh, maybe to anyone else he looked the same as ever, down to the not-quite-smile on his otherwise expressionless face, but Chuuya’d known him way too long to be fooled. This was Dazai making an effort to look disinterested and aloof.
“Oi,” he said, wandering over to kick at the side of Dazai’s boot. “If you’re not gonna make yourself useful, make yourself scarce already.”
Dazai pulled himself up to his full height, forcing Chuuya to tip his head back to hold his gaze. “How uncharacteristically eloquent,” he rasped. Fuck, that actually sounded… kind of painful.
Chuuya made a face. “Save it for when you’re not about to keel over,” he muttered, turning away with a dismissive wave. “I can deal with the rest of this shit.” It wasn’t even Glasses, just some random underling in a badly-fitted suit.
The tufts of tawny feathers rising from his severe haircut quivered at Chuuya's approach, but he only nodded shortly, offering clipped thanks as he waved the secure transport van out of the gate. Chuuya pulled off his hat as he wandered after it, breathing in slowly. For all that it was second nature by now, hiding his fox features had never grown comfortable. The physical sensations of his ears rearranging themselves and tail melting back into the base of his spine were bad enough, but holding the human form took an annoying amount of effort.
It was necessary, though, in order to move in human society. Chuuya glanced up at the sky as he turned onto a better lit street, eyeing the faint scatter of stars. It was nice enough that he'd have walked the couple of kilometres back to Headquarters, but there was a pile of paperwork waiting on his desk and the night wasn't getting any younger.
With a sigh, Chuuya reached for his phone to call for a car. If there was a part of him that hoped Dazai had done the same, well, it was very deep down.
🦊
He was deep into a proposal from the offshore casino managers when his desk phone buzzed. Chuuya fumbled for the handset without looking up from his paperwork. "Yeah?"
"Sorry to disturb you, sir," Aiko from the front desk said, audibly nervous. She was new. "There's a young lady asking to speak to you."
That dragged Chuuya out of his preoccupation. "Hah?" No one who belonged to the organisation would go to the front desk in the first place. "I'm not expecting anyone."
"Um, she gave her name as Kit," Aiko ventured uncertainly. Chuuya's pen stilled over the document he was supposed to be signing.
"Send her – no. I'll be right down." Slamming the folder closed, pen and all, he shoved himself up and stalked out to the stairwell. The Boss had remodeled the place a while back, adding a central shaft that was supposedly for defensibility, but Chuuya wouldn't be surprised if stopping him from jumping out of windows had figured into Mori's plans at some level.
A cut-off scream from behind him as he vaulted the rail meant another newbie who hadn't been warned. Chuuya ignored the brief commotion, dropping like a stone at twice terminal velocity only to land like a feather on the ball of one foot. He stalked out to the lobby with his ears laid back, ignoring the few members loitering or talking to the receptionists, all his attention focused immediately on the tiny figure standing alone in the middle of the floor.
Determination was visible on her face as she looked up at him. Chuuya took a resigned breath, coming to a stop in front of her. "What are you doing here, little sister?"
"Chuuya-nii." Kyouka gave a little bow. When she straightened, a pair of silky black ears had crept up the sides of her head, and her tail stirred the hem of her kimono. Chuuya flicked his own in response, nodding shortly.
"Truce or no truce," he pointed out, "you don't belong here any more, kit."
Kyouka faced him head-on, proud as she'd always been. "I know that." Her ears quivered. "I came to ask what you did with Dazai-san, since none of the rest of them would."
That… was not what Chuuya had been expecting. "What?" He squinted at her, but she wasn't a liar. "What do you mean?"
Kyouka visibly took in the alert set of his ears and the poised stillness of his tail. "He didn't come to the office yesterday," she said. "Or today. No one's heard from him since your mission the other night."
Oh, great. Chuuya sighed, lifting a hand to pinch at the bridge of his nose. "Look, kit, maybe you don't know it yet, but that guy skips out on work all the damn time." Fuck, he wished he could put his fist through the face of whoever'd given Kyouka the idea that he was the person to ask about Dazai.
Kyouka's brows drew down into a tiny frown. Chuuya read irritation and stubbornness in the flick of her ears, more emotion than she'd displayed in her six months with the organisation. Hard as it was to admit, the Agency was good for her. "Dazai-san is Dazai-san," she said plainly. "He was grumpy when he left to meet you, and he smelled sick."
"...Great." Chuuya resettled his hat, expressing his general state of Dazai-induced irritation with a sharp lash of his tail. "He was definitely sick." Idiot. "He's probably just holed up in bed feeling sorry for himself, then."
Kyouka gave him a look that suggested Chuuya was particularly slow. "He's not in his dorm," she said as though it was self-evidently obvious. "We looked there first."
"Ugh." Giving in to temptation, Chuuya yanked his hat off to run his fingers through his hair, scratching around the base of his ears. They always itched when there was bullshit in the air. "Fuck, fine." Chances were, Dazai had retreated to lick his metaphorical wounds in one of his boltholes, since the concept of a home had apparently passed him by. He'd sounded shitty enough when Chuuya'd left him, though, that Chuuya was going to have to track him down just to make sure he wasn't dead in an alley somewhere. Fucking asshole.
"Thank you Chuuya-oniisan," Kyouka said, clearly satisfied that she'd persuaded him.
"Tch." Chuuya sighed, though, and forced his spine to unstiffen enough to swipe affectionately at her ears, mussing the silky fur. She bore up under it with as much resignation as ever, but he was sure this time that she leaned into his touch ever so slightly. "I'll go kick his ass for you," he said, "but in return you can go tell Ane-san why I'll be missing our evening meeting."
Kyouka's tail twitched, the soft white tip flickering below the hem of her robe. She only nodded, though, folding her hands into her sleeves. Well, Chuuya supposed as he jammed his hat back onto his head, pulling in his ears and tail as he prepared to go fishing, at least Kouyou would be in a good mood for the rest of the week.
🦊
"Oi, mackerel!" Chuuya banged the side of his fist against the shabby door, the second of Dazai's assorted safehouses he'd tried. He'd figured the odds were decent that Dazai had holed himself up to nurse his fever in someplace at least moderately comfortable, so he'd started with the nicest place he knew about. By contrast, this apartment block was older and crappier, but there was a convenience store next door and a cafe downstairs.
There was no sound from beyond the door. Chuuya scowled at it. "Open up," he demanded. The slam of his fist against wood echoed down the dirty balcony and around the tiny courtyard. "Don't think I won't come in there!" He wasn't willing to shift out here in the open, certainly not enough to smell whether Dazai'd been around lately. "I'll kick this damn door in if I have to!"
Cocking his head, Chuuya listened for some kind of response. It took a moment before he could pick it out from the soft background noise of any place where people lived, but no – that was a definite shuffling sound from inside the apartment. "I know you're in there, asshole!"
The shuffling was joined by a mumbling that Chuuya couldn't parse into speech. Not that he needed to – he could recognise Dazai's whiny complaints at fifty metres. He stepped back as the locks rattled, settling into a solid stance with his arms crossed over his chest.
The door shuddered open in increments. Dazai's face, sickly pale and blotchy, was just visible peering through the crack, though not much else was. He'd cocooned himself in a woolly blue blanket, draped over his head and wrapped around his shoulders like a cloak. He stared at Chuuya with dull, bloodshot eyes.
"Well?" Chuuya demanded eventually. He'd always despised playing messenger, damn it.
Dazai pulled his blanket more tightly around himself. "What do you want?" he croaked. It sounded painful as hell; Chuuya winced, sighed, unfolded his arms and shoved his foot into the crack of the door to keep it open. Dazai didn't even seem to notice, which was off enough for Chuuya to concede, to himself at least, that he might be slightly worried about the asshole.
A quick look up and down the walkway revealed no one snooping from doors or windows, but Chuuya hadn't survived this long by standing around having conversations in the open. "Let me in," he said, shoving at the door with his forearm. Dazai resisted for a moment, but they both knew Chuuya was the stronger even when he wasn't sick.
"What are you doing here?" Dazai rasped wearily, pulling his blanket tighter and backing away into the apartment. His feet, encased in socks so thick and fuzzy that they looked more like paws, slipped and slid on the floor when he stepped up out of the genkan. "Don't expect me to believe you actually gave a shit. Who sent you?"
"Kyouka." Chuuya didn't see any reason to keep that to himself. "Your whole damn Agency has been trying to get hold of you all day, asshole. Turn on your fucking phone." He kicked the door shut behind him, relaxing his grip on his form and pulling off his hat to shake out his ears and tail.
Dazai looked down at him, expressionless. From the step the height difference was uncomfortably exaggerated, and Chuuya found himself toeing off his boots automatically, stepping up uninvited. That made Dazai's mouth twitch, but after a second he sighed, shuffling backward. His face creased briefly into an expression of concentration that was there and gone so fast that anyone but Chuuya, too familiar with the tiny shifts that passed for his expressions, would have missed it.
"If you want to catch this," Dazai said, thick-voiced, "be my guest."
Chuuya curled his lip. "What, not denying you're sick?" he needled, flicking his tail derisively. "I'm not the kind of weakling who'd fall on my ass over some shitty virus, mackerel. And I have no intention of getting any closer to you than I have to."
Dazai turned his back, trudging into the main room. "And yet," he said, then paused to cough painfully. "Here you are."
"Here I am," Chuuya said, rolling his eyes as he stopped in the doorway. The entire couch was just one giant heap of blankets and tissues, the coffee table cluttered with cans and bottles and medicine packets. He pinned his ears back, screwing up his face at the thick smell of fever sweat and sickly cough syrup. "Kicking your dumb ass, as a favour to Kyouka-chan."
"You mean she gave you the eyes," Dazai mumbled. He plonked himself back down into the middle of his disgusting trashpile and started pawing through the crap on the table. The blue blanket, reunited with its filthy brethren, slipped off his head to puddle around his waist as he fumbled the cap off a bottle of cough mixture and took a generous swig.
Chuuya grimaced. "You know that shit's useless."
"Yes," Dazai said, blinking dull eyes at him, "but if I try hard enough it might kill me." He held Chuuya's gaze as he tipped the bottle back again, swallowing exaggeratedly.
Chuuya snorted. "More like give you the shits, idiot. Drink some fucking tea or something and get some damn sleep. You're not gonna die."
Dazai sighed, drooping. "Unfair," he complained, sniffling a little. He wrinkled his nose. "If I can't put myself out of my misery, and you won't, at least put yourself out of my misery."
That… made no sense, no matter how Chuuya squinted at Dazai's blotchy, hollow-eyed face. "What?" he demanded, flicking his ears. Dazai's eyes followed their motion; it seemed as if he'd never lost that tendency to fixate on them. Chuuya had lost count of the number of times Dazai has tried to pull them before he'd known him a year.
Dazai stared at him as though Chuuya was an especially dull and uninteresting child. "I'm," he started, pausing to sniff again, "telling you to go away." His nose twitched again and he started fumbling at his mess of blankets. "Leave me to die in pea – ah," he cut himself off, patting more urgently around himself for a tissue as the obvious beginnings of a sneeze took hold. "Ah, ah – hnksh."
Dazai's body convulsed with a jolt entirely out of proportion to the stupidly tiny sound of his sneeze. He sneezed again almost immediately, and then a third time, hunched miserably over himself as the two long, soft, glossy brown ears that had appeared from nowhere flattened themselves back against his head.
Chuuya stared. "What," he said eventually, carefully, flatly, "the fuck."
🦊
"You're a rabbit," Chuuya said. It was not the first time he'd said it. He was having trouble integrating this – being Dazai with two fluffy, floppy bunny ears poking out of his sulky blanket hood – into his worldview.
Dazai glowered at him. One of his ears twitched. "Stop saying that," he muttered hoarsely.
"No." Chuuya flicked his own ears. "You're a fucking bunnyboy."
"I am aware," Dazai said, throwing a wadded up tissue at Chuuya. It fell short by at least a metre, and he pushed his lower lip out in irritation. It was a lot cuter with the ears, Chuuya'd give him that.
"A. Bunny. Boy." Chuuya shook his head, stalking around to the end of the couch for a side-on view. Buried in the blankets as he was, it was impossible to see if Dazai had a bunny tail too, and Chuuya couldn't picture it. If he closed his eyes, the ears melted right off, his mental image of Dazai perpetually smirking out of the bloody dark. Human-featured but so obviously a panther in cat's clothing that Chuuya had been certain that was what he was hiding.
"And Chuuya's a fox. So what!" Dazai threw another wad of tissue at him; it bounced off the air twenty centimetres from Chuuya's shoulder, dropping limply to the floor. "Now that you've barged in, made a pest of yourself, and forced me to expose my personal business to you, you can go away. Let me die in peace."
"Tch." Chuuya shook his head. "You're not gonna die of a damn cold, idiot mackerel. Just drink some fucking tea or something and phone your damn Agency already."
"How do you know?" Dazai muttered darkly, He hunched his shoulders, wriggling as he burrowed himself down further into his blanket nest until only his nose and the top of his head were peeking out. And those fucking ears. Chuuya could swear there was a hint of paler fur visible beneath the brown, buried in the fluff at the base. Dazai's nose twitched; so did Chuuya's tail.
"Normal people get colds all the fucking time," Chuuya said, rolling his eyes. That had never included him, of course, but this couldn't be the first time Dazai'd come down with something, could it? He tried to think back to the days of their supposed partnership, but nothing came to mind. Fuck, maybe it was.
Or maybe Dazai was just being a fucking baby because he could. He twitched his nose again as Chuuya thought it, as though he could hear, and sneezed once, massively, then another three times in quick succession. Chuuya curled his lip and took a step back, hopefully out of reach of any germs. That put him in sight of the kitchen, which… well, no wonder Dazai was sick.
"For fuck's sake." Chuuya stomped through the door. If a vegetable had seen the inside of this apartment in six months he'd be surprised. Shoving a stack of empty takeout boxes and dirty dishes aside, he lifted the kettle and was unsurprised to find it empty. "How the hell are you a damn rabbit?" he demanded over his shoulder as he filled it and flicked it on. "When was the last time you ate anything green?"
Dazai, half muffled by his blanket nest, mumbled something that sounded like it might be about spring onions. Chuuya indulged himself, since he was alone in here, in a silent snarl, ears laid back and tail lifted high. Claws pricked briefly at the insides of his gloves as he flexed his fingers, before he pulled them back.
It took opening every cupboard in the tiny room to find the tea. Chuuya sighed at the cheap, battered box, and scooped extra into the pot as revenge. It smelled decent enough when he poured it, at least.
"Here." He kicked at what he thought was the sofa cushion until the bundle of mismatched blankets shifted and Dazai's head popped out. He blinked suspicious, bleary eyes at Chuuya, and it took him a long moment to drop his focus to the cup Chuuya was holding out.
"Is it poison?" he croaked. One ear twitched; he looked like he wasn't sure what answer he hoped for more.
Chuuya groaned in the back of his throat. "It's fucking tea, you–" He lifted his foot again, shoving at the mess on the couch until Dazai grumbled and wriggled aside enough to make room for him to sit. "Here." He shoved the cup in front of Dazai's face, holding it there with what was, frankly, near-saintly patience as Dazai visibly considered whether he could just drink out of it like this, realised he couldn't, and was finally forced to excavate a hand from the heap.
His nose twitched as he sniffed at it. Chuuya caught himself staring and folded his arms over his chest, flicking his ears deliberately back.
Dazai's ears quivered as he slurped at the tea. "Hot," he complained peevishly, huffing at the steam, but he took another sip almost immediately.
"Yeah, it's fucking tea," Chuuya said. Again. "Dumbass, have you even been drinking anything apart from that sickly shit and booze?"
Dazai tried to say something in response to that, but his mouth was occupied in guzzling down the tea between cooling breaths. Chuuya sighed and shoved himself back to his feet to fetch the pot.
Two cups later, Dazai had kicked off a couple of the thickest blankets but remained stubbornly bundled in the rest as he curled over the tea. His eyes were starting to droop, the ear nearest Chuuya twitching every few seconds as he visibly forced back sleepiness.
"You're such a pain in the ass," Chuuya told him as Dazai yawned and tried to cover it with another mouthful of tea. Dazai grumbled something incoherent. "Why am I always the one who has to deal with the shit you get yourself into, huh? I'm not your damn keeper."
With a huff and a heave, Dazai flailed himself forward, almost overbalancing off the couch in the process, to put the cup down on the coffee table. Or on a plate that was on the coffee table, anyway. "If you were, you'd have to be nice to me," he mumbled. His face when he tucked himself back into the corner of the couch was flushed and sulky.
Chuuya sighed. "I'm exactly as nice as you deserve," he said, mildly enough. "And you know it, Mackerel." He pinched, not ungently, at one of those long floppy ears, near the end where the fur was ruffled and disordered. Did Dazai know anything at all about keeping himself groomed? As far as Chuuya knew, he was the first and only person to ever have seen the idiot like this. "Why all the damn secrecy, anyway?" The mafia was one thing, but Dazai was part of the Agency now, supposedly a reformed character.
Dazai yelped, shaking his head free and laying his ears back, and retaliated – of course – by grabbing at Chuuya's tail. He seemed to run out of steam at that point, though, his fingers loosening as he flopped back into his ridiculous nest. "That's all very well for you to say," he grumbled, "but don't tell me you don't know exactly how the organisation's enemies would have reacted."
"Hah." Chuuya couldn't really argue that. He flicked his tail out of Dazai's lax grip, but there was nowhere to put it other than right down the side of his leg – both uncomfortable and a magnet for twitchy mackerel fingers. Flattening his ears, he eventually resorted to tucking it around Dazai's back. He bared his teeth when Dazai gave him a sideways look.
"You're hugging me with your tail," he pointed out.
Chuuya sniffed. "Am not." He flinched when Dazai's fingers sneaked their way through the blankets to fumble with the white-furred tip. "Stop that, damn it! This isn't a fucking petting zoo!"
Dazai hmphed and didn't let go, though he relaxed his grip, stroking his fingers absently through the thick fur. "You poked my ear," he declared, "so you have no leg to stand on."
"Yeah, 'cause I'm still having trouble believing what I'm seeing, bunnyboy." Chuuya darted out a hand, tugging Dazai's nearest ear. Its fur was softer than his, denser maybe, turning to tufts of fluff that were all but hidden by his hair at the base. "You've seen my tail a million damn times." Pulled it, too, and of course Dazai did it again now in retaliation. "Fucking – ow!"
Dazai leaned away from Chuuya's attempts to tug on his ear, flattening them back against his skull and hunching his shoulders as he clung obstinately to the end of Chuuya's tail. His nose twitched, his eyes narrowed irritably, but whatever he might have said was interrupted by a sudden fit of coughing that overtook him. It sounded unpleasant, and Chuuya tried to unobtrusively shuffle a little further away. He'd have to stop by the convenience store on his way home and stock up on vitamin supplements.
"If you get your gross germs anywhere near me," he said as Dazai finally managed to choke to a halt, breathing raspily, "I'm gonna fucking kill you." Still, he reached for the pot, topping up Dazai's tea.
Dazai cleared his throat, a thick painful sound. "Do it now and save us both the trouble," he croaked, slumping back against the back of the couch. His fingers snuck themselves around the tip of Chuuya's tail again, and he shifted sideways without prompting to take his weight off it. His shoulder brushed against Chuuya's as he sipped at the cooling tea.
Chuuya swallowed. Even through his jacket and shirt and at least three layers of dirty blanket he could feel how warm Dazai was. Fever-warm and living-warm, in a way he hadn't allowed himself to notice since they'd put aside childish foolishness to take up the mantles Mori'd offered.
Dazai yawned, ears twitching, and slumped over a little further, head lolling toward Chuuya's shoulder. Chuuya stared straight forward at the opposite wall of Dazai's near-empty apartment; fought with himself, caught between the urges to shove Dazai away and stalk out and to pull him down, in, closer. A part of him, somewhere deep inside below even the lurking beast, quivered, whispering prey.
Stock still, Chuuya waited out the warring impulses until Dazai took control of the battlefield, sliding down to rest his bony head on Chuuya's shoulder. The soft fur of his right ear tickled, warm, against the skin between Chuuya's collar and choker. "Warm," Dazai slurred, clearly already half asleep. "Why're you so surprised, anyway? I know you knew…" He broke off into a yawn, curling further into Chuuya's side. His hand loosened on Chuuya's tail.
Somehow, despite the resigned blankness of Chuuya's thoughts, he managed to scrape up the presence of mind to snort. "Idiot mackerel," he said, low, not even sure if Dazai was awake enough to hear. "If there's any Ability user who's more of a damn cat than you, I've never met 'em."
Dazai's only answer was to turn his face into Chuuya's shoulder, his nose twitching in his sleep as he started to snore.