Twst with a very little twist
Part 1 - Grim's chapter/If the shoe fits...
Summary: Local baby appears in a coffin in a different world with no identification or way home. Prevents several mental breakdowns accidentally. More at 11.
(Masterlist)
To say that Grim was a little surprised when he opened the coffin and found a very young human in there was an understatement.
At least the clothes would fit him.
He inched closer, eyes narrowed. The kid wasn’t particularly fearful, but they didn’t seem all that happy to see him either. Large, dark brown eyes stared at him from beneath their hood. Expressionless even when there was fire flickering inches from their face, though there was no way they could know that the flames were only for show. They didn’t even seem bored or indifferent, just blank. Vacant, really.
Feline lips curled into a scowl as he, almost literally, fumed. He couldn’t get into the ultra-cool magic school, but for some reason this child could? What did this child have that he didn’t? Outside of an overabundance of drool, perhaps.
Besides, he could drool more if that was a requirement for the school. He wasn’t going to, he is nothing if not principled, but he could.
(Though… if – no, when – he replaced them and got in, perhaps he would look around and see if any of the other attendees were as… drooly. For scientific reasons.)
He crossed his arms over his chest, floating closer to the child that was peering at him, apparently scrutinizing him. They slowly started to smile as he got closer.
“Pets?”
A tiny, chubby hand reached out and he couldn’t help himself from sniffing the hand for a moment, considering, before tipping his head slightly and allowing the kid to slide their hand over his head. They giggled and leaned further, now reaching their other hand for him. He smirked a little. Nice to know that he fascinated the kid. Perhaps they weren’t so bad, after all. And, hey, they were actually really good at this ‘petting’ thing. They were getting that place just in front of his ear he could just never seem to get. Maybe he could make them his henchman or something.
“Good kitty!” The kid said.
His amusement snapped out of existence like it had never been there at all. He started to reel back.
Unfortunately for him, the kid was just slightly faster, and he ended up being pulled into a hug. The thick robes made it very hard for him to retaliate. He couldn’t bite or scratch the kid at all!
… though, admittedly, it was a decently nice hug despite the attempted murder. The kid was only a head taller than him, and he slotted into their arms perfectly. And they had just the right mix of baby fat and fabric to be squishy and soft.
He resigned himself to being hugged for as long as the kid wished. It wasn’t like he could get away without ruining the clothes they were wearing, and then he would have to find another coffin to open and there was no way the next one would have clothes that fit quite as well as this one.
Unfortunately, he had been wasting time that he didn’t have. The door to the ceremony hall swung open.
“– ready to meet all of your kouhais –!” A large man that looked rather like a bird was saying, but he was soon cut off by someone screaming.
“Fire!” Someone screamed.
“Oh, no, that’s just my hair,” a boy who, indeed, had fire for hair mumbled, tugging their hood over their head and trying to duck out of view.
“Nonono, they’re right, look over there!” Another yelled, and a finger pointed in their direction.
That drew everyone’s eyes. Grim has no clue how they had managed to not notice the flames before, but now that he had everyone’s attention he kind of wished to go back to them being hopelessly blind. Mostly because he was still being half-strangled by a child. Embarrassing. But, at least, if he resigned himself to it it didn’t look like he was losing. Maybe he should just pretend to be a stuffed animal or something –?
The birdman sighed deeply. “Didn’t even get all the way into the hall this year,” he murmured somewhat bitterly, quiet enough so that only Grim’s hypersensitive ears could really hear.
The man visibly took a moment to prepare himself before he turned around, only to stop cold.
He stared at the pair, wrapped around each other in a coffin.
No one dared to say a word as the man processed this information with the depth and speed of a computer from the 1950s.
Finally, it clicked:
He groaned. “How am I supposed to extort a baby?”
This earned several different reactions, all ranging from mild shock to horror. Which was fair. For once in his life, Grim was completely speechless.
He paled slightly – it was surprising that was even possible – and his head jerked to look behind him. “I said that aloud, didn’t I?”
A couple of the students nodded their heads, their eyes still wide.
The man groaned again. Louder this time. He dragged a hand down his face.
He didn’t even bother to take it back.
… know what? Maybe this school wasn’t so cool after all.
Grim looked down at the kid that he was pretty sure was nodding off into his fur. He placed a careful paw on top of their head and bared his teeth at the man.
Said man tilted his head to the side and, wow, he really is a bird. Good. If Grim really was a ‘kitty’, as the kid thought, then he outranked this bird in every way.
“Mine.”
“I don’t think it works like that,” the man said, smiling in that fake way people love to do when they think you’re dumb. Which Grim isn’t.
“You just said you were gonna extort ‘em!”
“I just said I couldn’t. And do you really think you can care for a human child better than I could?”
Damn. He had a point.
About the whole ‘taking care of a human child thing’, Grim was obviously calling BS on the extortion thing.
More seriously, though, Grim wasn’t a human – he boasted about being a monster all of the time. He didn’t even remember being a child, he had simply woken up one day, fully formed, a ribbon knotted around his neck and flames dancing along his tongue. He didn’t know how to deal with a kid this young. He didn’t even know what humans were supposed to eat.
Grim huffed, a tiny curl of steam slipping from his nose.
He looked down at the kid, whose eyes had caught on the Magic Mirror in the center of the room. They were frowning in blatant confusion, their eyes falling beneath the head hanging in the center as if looking for a neck. But they seemed to notice his gaze, as they looked back at him.
“Kitty?”
“I will come back for you when you are older,” he told them solemnly.
The kid blinked at him.
And then they smiled and patted him on the head. “M’kay!”
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