#so that'll be its own chapter or interlude later

[we-were-so-beautiful]

2. day six

holy shit hi! it's me! I'm back! I will be very surprised if anybody remembers me or this story given that it's been literally six months since I posted the first chapter. my motivation, interest, energy and amount of free time for this project all fluctuate, but... this story feels like it wants to be told, and I want to tell it. so hopefully I'll manage to pop up around here with an update for it every once in a while.

Content warnings for this chapter: box boy universe, pet whump, dehumanization, cages, blood mention. I'm still getting the hang of how to tag these so please let me know if there's anything I missed.

[masterlist] [chapter one] [chapter three]

Vanessa means to wait until an hour before closing time to go to the shelter. Really, she does. She wants to give this guy as much of a chance as he can get to go home with someone, literally anyone, who’s better for him than she is. But it’s lunchtime and she’s already practically vibrating. She’s not even used to being awake by noon anymore, much less having already been up for hours refreshing the site so often it’s making her nauseous. Or maybe that’s just the all-consuming anxiety of suspense.

What if the assholes at the shelter decide that six days is close enough, and take him away before she even gets there? What if she’s fucked up and counted the days wrong, and he’s actually scheduled to die today? What if the subway’s delayed, or the shelter closes early, and she’s too late, and another person dies because she made a stupid fucking mistake?

What if, says the voice in the back of her head that she refuses to listen to, somebody takes him who’s even worse for him than me?

“Oh, fuck literally all of this,” she says to the empty room, and grabs her coat.

—

“Uh, hey, I’m here to…”

“Sign in on the sheet.” The bored-looking shelter employee doesn��t so much as glance up from her phone. Vanessa looks around; the lobby is totally devoid of anyone save for the two of them.

“I just want to know if—”

“Sign in on the sheet.”

Vanessa breathes out through her nose until her hand stops ticking long enough to write. She scribbles her name and the time, and sets the pen down with a deliberate clack on the desk directly in front of the employee.

The woman barely raises her head. “How can I help you.”

Vanessa steels herself. “Is, uh… Do you still have…” God she hates talking about people like this she hates it she hates it she hates it. “Is pet number 414374 still here? I want to…” She wants to choke on the word. “...I want to adopt him.”

The employee’s affect goes duller than ever. “Oh, he’s still here, alright,” she mutters grimly.

Vanessa only realizes how much tension she’s been holding when it floods out of her so fast she almost loses her balance. “Can I see him?”

“If you really want to,” the employee sighs. “But I’m tellin’ you, lady, you’re not gonna like what you find.”

—

“That’s him?!”

“Told you you were gonna be disappointed, lady.”

Vanessa gapes. It’s not like she’s been expecting to be okay with seeing people in cages, but she sure as shit didn’t expect… whatever the fuck she’s looking at now.

The dude is filthy, caked head to toe in blood, dirt and worse. The hair that flowed around him in his picture is matted down his back now, littered with scores of dead and decaying leaves. His ice-blue eyes are dull and unfocused. His breaths are quick and shallow, and the way they rasp in his throat makes Vanessa twitch. 

He’s lying in a heap on the single layer of newspaper between him and the inch-wide mesh of the shelter-standard cage. Vanessa sucks at math, but she thinks it can’t be more than three by three by five. The shelter profile listed him at six foot two.

The employee bangs on the metal with the back of her hand, making a horrible clanging sound that makes Vanessa want to claw her own ears off. “Hey, look alive, refurb. You got one more interested owner. Maybe try to impress this one for a change?”

“Can he even—” Vanessa starts, but the guy surprises her by slowly, painfully lifting his head. The dirt that coats his skin cracks and flakes as he struggles to push himself up on his elbows. He reaches jerkily for the front of the cage, arms trembling violently with the effort, his breathing growing more and more labored as he tries to meet her gaze.

In the split second before he collapses again, she swears he manages it.

—

“I want him.”

The employee has already turned to go, talking over her shoulder as she ambles back toward the desk. “Yeah, so if you're lookin’ for a fancy one you could try the Manhattan shelter, they sometimes—hang on, you what?” She twists back abruptly as the words actually register.

“I want him,” Vanessa says again.

The employee stares at her for a long, long minute. Vanessa can almost see her fighting the urge to blurt out, “why?” Finally, though, she collects herself, with a wildly overexaggerated shrug of her shoulders.

“It’s your money, lady,” she says, and unlocks the cage.