December 2022
Link to Pet:
Pet's name: Finnick
Entry: (750 words)
Finnick was just on the edge of panic.
She turned, eyes scanning the floor. She tapped her hind leg on the ground a few times.
The world is too loud and her fur isn't sitting right against her body and the lights are too bright and she could see too much.
She slammed her eyes shut, ears already pressed firmly to her head, she tapped her foot again and then took to humming. She fought valiantly to keep it into some sort of tune instead of letting it turn into plain whining.
She needed Spots - an ocelot plushie that became her Number One Favorite as a kit and kept that title since.
She needed Spots like she needed air to breathe, limbs attached to her body, and her whiskers on her snout. Spot's fur was the Right Texture and it's spots were a perfectly countable fifty-eight and its paws were filled with beads, giving it the Correct Squish when she pressed her paws against it's.
She turned again, tapping her foot, humming what was mostly a whine this time and forced her eyes open.
Spots wasn't on her bed, but maybe it was mixed in with her bedding. Spots wasn't on her desk, but it could have fallen behind it. Spots wasn't on her floor but it could've been kicked and slid underneath the bed.
Moving from her place in the middle of the room kind of sounded like the worst thing ever.
The bedding's texture was currently Wrong, which she knew was silly but it didn't change the fact that it was, and if she looked behind her desk or under her bed she knew that would get a significant amount of dust caking on the fur in the bottom of her paws, which would send her into a frenzy of trying to get the icky feeling off.
She didn’t hum, she just whined at the back of her throat and tapped and thumped her foot, knowing any creature that walked by her room would know that there was a very irritated rabbit nearby. But the thumping did little to block out the noise the world dared to make, she had run from the initial cause but she could still hear the quiet mumble of the TV in the other room, the birds having a lively conversation outside, the humming of the fridge - seriously, she was in her room with the door shut why could she still hear the refrigerator?
She pushed herself forward through the buzzing wrongness of everything, she reached her desk and waiting for there were her headphones. She could almost physically feel the noise canceling being on but it at least didn't feel bad and mostly blocked the rest of the world out.
She hopped up on the desk and leaned over to see if anything had fallen behind it, a bit over the top but it worked to avoid getting near the dust.
It didn’t matter though, because Spots was not behind her desk.
She hopped down and to her bed. She cringed, the bedding’s texture was still Wrong. Well, rabbits had teeth for a reason. She bit her blanket and tugged.
She scowled, the only thing wrapped in her bedding was her pillow.
She dropped the blanket, shuffling anxiously. That left under the bed. If Spots wasn’t there, she didn't know what she would do.
She dropped low to the ground to peer into the darkness. There was the dreaded dust, as expected, but there was also the silhouette of something in the shadows.
She reached forward with both paws, clinging to the plush. She batted it excessively once it was out in the light and she could see the clumps of dust clinging to it. She shook it and pawed at it until the dust was mostly gone and it was once again the Correct texture, and then she dealt with the dust on her paws the best she could.
She pressed her paws into Spot’s, relishing in the Correct Squish of individual beads. It was almost instinctive to start counting.
Six spots on its head and eight on each leg and twenty on its body. Fifty-eight in total.
Finnick breathed, for what felt like the first time since she entered her room. She wasn’t quite ready to remove her headphones but the unsettling feeling inside her had dropped from a rolling boil to a dull simmer. She clung to Spots, wrapping her entire body around it and breathed.
She’d be okay.