When the sorcerer found the dragon, it was attacking a grape.
This was only possible because the dragon was not much larger than a grape itself, but she still had to do a double take to be sure the object it was fighting with such animosity was in fact inanimate.
She crouched so that her eyes were level with the top of the table and squinted at it. The dragon sank its tiny fangs into the grape’s skin and gave a great tug, succeeding only in throwing it and the grape into a backwards tumble. The tiny green reptile rolled to a stop with its whole body wrapped around the grape and shook its head ferociously, managing to pull its teeth out but also launching the grape across the table. It gave a mighty roar of anger (about as loud as a human clearing their throat) and stalked after it, tail swishing dangerously.
“Do you need help?” she offered.
The dragon froze mid-prowl and whipped its head around to look at her, looking so offended she almost apologized for asking.
“I mean, I could peel it for you, if that’s the problem.” She wasn’t sure it was getting the message. One could never tell how much human language these little creatures picked up by hanging around the magic labs. Some understood only such essentials as “scat!” or “oh fuck, that sure did just explode”, while others could hold entire conversations — if they deigned to interact.
This one looked like it was deciding whether she was worthy. Finally, it sniffed daintily and flicked its tail, scales clacking together. “Little monster is my prey, and you can’t have it. Found it first. Will devour it!”
“Oh, sure,” she agreed. “But you know it’s a grape, right?”
This was the wrong thing to say. It glared at her and then bounded away to the other end of the table, where it slithered up to the grape and pounced on it.
Grape and dragon promptly rolled off the edge of the table.
The sorcerer quickly went around to that side, alarmed that it would be stepped on. The labs were bustling with shoppers stopping by to watch demonstrations this time of day, and a small dragon wouldn’t be easily visible on the blue and green tiled floor.
“Horrible! Dirty!” The tiny dragon was screeching at the top of its lungs, holding onto its prey for dear life. It would have been hard to hear anyway, with all the noise of the labs, but with the sorcerer’s diminished hearing it took several seconds to locate the screaming creature.
She scanned the pattern of the tiles for it and sighed. “Oh, hold on, we mopped this morning.” She cupped her hands around it and deposited it into her skirt pocket, an indignity the dragon endured only with more screaming.
“An outrage! Put me down!”
“Shh,” she advised. Lab workers were strongly discouraged from bringing creatures into the back rooms, which was where she was heading, picking her way through the crowded front lab.
“Fuck pockets!” her pocket responded.
“Oh, you can curse. Wonderful.”
The dragon seemed to take this as an actual compliment. “Am multitalented. Can also compose poetry.”
“Really? Can I hear some?”
“No. For dragon ears only.” It sounded viciously pleased to hold this over her head. The bulge in her pocket rearranged itself, and she thought it might be trying to gnaw on the grape.
She felt herself smiling even as she tried to squash her mouth into a straight line. She liked this little bad-tempered thing, even though its spiky feet were digging into her thigh.
In the much quieter kitchen of the back rooms behind the lab, she transferred the wriggling, scaly handful from her pocket to the table. The dragon hissed out a few more insults as it got up and straightened itself out, but its jaw fell open when it finally took in its surroundings. She’d set it down next to the fruit bowl.
“There you go. Food mountain.”
The dragon’s shock didn’t last long. Abandoning the grape, it scraped and scrabbled its way up the side of the bowl and from there onto an apple, its claws leaving tiny puncture marks as it hiked to the top of the arrangement. “Food mountain!” It repeated, its gleeful crowing much clearer and almost sing-song without having to compete with the noise of the crowd.
She watched it turn in a circle, surveying the feast. “But… cannot eat it all,” it observed after a while, crestfallen. “Human-sized. Big shame.”
“Don’t you have nest-mates who can help you with it?” she asked. She had assumed not, from the way it had apparently been foraging for food on its own, but she needed to be sure she’d found a loner.
“No nest. No mates. No nest-mates. You’re rude.” It flopped down ungracefully, wings spread out flat on the apple like it was trying to hug the entire much-larger fruit.
She gave it a moment to be dramatic, and then offered it the grape, minus the peel. “You seem to have a good grasp on human-speak.”
It grabbed the grape without so much as a thank you. “Yes. Have composed poetry in both Dragonese and Humanese. Not for humans to hear, though.” Bragging cheered it up a little.
“You mentioned. I can’t hear very well, anyway.” She pulled up a stool and sat down. “Actually, I’ve been looking for a helper.”
“An assistant,” it said, apparently showing off its Humanese. “An attendant. An aid.”
She watched it bury its snout in the grape, juice dribbling down onto the apple it sat on. “Yes. A hearing aid. How would you feel about having a job?”
It smiled craftily. “Would feel positively, if job comes with chocolate chips.”
“It could,” she said, grinning. She had some friends who employed bird-sized dragons as messengers, but this was the first time she’d heard of one negotiating its salary for itself. “It certainly could. What’s your name?”
“Peep,” said Peep. “It is self-explanatory.”
“Don’t worry, I got it.”
Peep expressed its doubt that humans ever got anything, but she thought the tiny, prickly creature might be warming up to her.
Fuck pockets! XD
This is THE MOST ADORABLE
I want this as a novel, an audiobook, a movie and a graphic novel
Tag: awesome story
My best friend pet sat a cat named Lenny who was so spherical that if you ignored his legs, you could calculate his exact volume and surface area from his circumference. Like literally, this cat was so fat that he was a geometric perfection, less of a body and more a mathematical diagram. So fat. So so fat. A black basketball that meowed. And he moved with an aristocratic grace. If he wanted to jump up into your lap, by god he would jump up into your lap with the blithe self-assurance of a cat who has never considered he might fail. He balanced on his feet with a ballerina’s poise. He was a cat who looked like he should have been wearing a top hat and a monocle, and he should have had 12 children whom he loved dearly, and if he spoke, it would be the posh kind of English and he’d say “right-o” without any irony as he died of gout. I met this cat once, and I love him so much it hurts just to think about it.
So.
Some time when he is on the run doing the whole Secret Avenger thing, Sam Wilson picks up a cat. Maybe it’s a stray, a scrawny sort of sorry beast you find in back alleys and under bushes, the kind of animal that demands you drop everything and attend to this little rag of helplessness, and maybe that’s exactly what Sam did and he kept attending to it and look at how beautiful his cat is now. Or maybe Sam stole (borrowed) a car one day and neglected to see the cat carrier in the back, and oh my god, he just stole someone’s cat, he just stole someone’s cat, and Sam is feeling like the worst person in the world, until Steve finds some paperwork that says this cat was about to get dropped off at the pound, at which point Sam switches over into pure rage because who would ever get rid of this cat. Or maybe Sam just goes to the pound one day, and when Steve comes back to their apartment, they own a cat now. Steve rolls with it; he knows Sam’s lost a lot. And. Well. It is a hell of a cat.
(“I’m just saying, this cat could have fed a family of twelve in the Depression,” Steve says as he pets the sheer mass of feline opulence in his lap, and Sam’s like, “We get it, Cap, you’re old.”)
And Sam realizes that he has to name this cat. And he looks at this creature, this pure and perfect cat of unparalleled majesty, and there’s only one name that he can think to give it.
And at some point, during some crisis, they team up with T’Challa once more to take out, I don’t know, a evil space robot or something. And when they’re done and the world is saved, Sam is like, “Hey man, you oughta hang out with us before you head back,” and he says this because 1) hell yeah T’Challa should come hang out with them, that would be so fucking cool, and it would feel almost like being back at the Compound, a bunch of good people hanging out together after doing good things, and all of a sudden Sam misses the Avengers in a way he can’t talk about with Steve because Steve will just apologize again and, like, that’s not it. That’s not the point.
“Sure,” says T’Challa, who looks too good for a man standing there in half a cat costume.
Maybe Sam’s a little too rah-rah American to pay much head to royals, but damn does he remember that T’Challa is a king as Sam opens the door to the shitty apartment they’ve been hiding in. It’s secret, which means it’s terrible, which means that there’s barely anything that Sam would want T’Challa to touch, let alone sit in, and Steve’s already peeled off to claim first dibs on the shower, and Sam’s just standing there trying to think of something to say that’s not incredibly awkward.
“Boy, you should have seen where I was staying before you helped arrest me,” Sam says. “That was a cool place.”
Nailed it.
T’Challa looks like he is trying to think of something to say too, something that’s like probably along the lines of yeah sorry I helped arrest you, thought your friend was a murderer lol by the way he’s still fine in our freezers, when they hear the soft thud that means the cat’s woken up. It sounds a bit like thunder from far away. And then there’s the cheerful tinkling of his bell as the cat trots merrily out into the living room. If you put him next to a 19th century country gentleman named Lord Faulteroy of Missionhillwestshire, Sam is not sure he could say which one is which.
“My god,” T’Challa says, which is what most people say when they see Sam’s cat for the first time.
“Yeah,” Sam replies, and then as T’Challa kneels and reaches out a hand, Sam realizes something he probably should have realized before he brought the King of Wakanda here. “Ummm,” Sam manages to get out before T’Challa reads the tag on the cat’s collar.
There’s a brief silence.
“There are two ‘l’s in my name,” T’Challa says as he pulls as much of Lil T’Chala into his lap as he can manage.
“Petsmart fucked that up,” Sam says. “That’s not on me.” It was in fact on him. Sam was too sure that he knew how to spell T’Challa’s name without checking. He’d own up to the mistake, because yeah, he feels like a dick about it, but he’s already lied about it being Petsmart’s fault to Steve because otherwise Steve will just give him that grin and be like, have you heard of this thing called Google? Answers all your questions. Sam couldn’t handle that.
T’Challa smiles. Then he bows his head. He solemnly takes his namesake’s front paw, and says with a grave voice that Sam will learn to recognize someday as T’Challa’s joking voice, “Nice to meet you, your highness. Are you also the greatest warrior in your land?”
And in this universe, in this place, that’s the moment Sam lowkey falls in love.
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