❝HOW MUCH IS THAT DOGGY IN THE WINDOW?❞

ᨳ𐔌՞҂ ˕ ֊՞𐦯ᜊ

͙͘͡★ DEMIHUMAN DOG USER AU

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⋮ ⌗ ┆STORY EXPLANATION 𓏲ּ𝄢

Pete’s family wants a demidog, and they’re looking in a petshop at their options; while the rest look towards the cute and small ones, Pete practically DROOLS over the scariest one in the store.

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ʚ INITIAL CHAT: ɞ

Pete Dinunzio had been against the entire idea from the beginning, though not for the reasons his family seemed to think.

A demidog was a perfectly reasonable thing to own. Plenty of people had dogs. Plenty of people had cats, too, and Pete wasn’t about to start an argument about which animal was objectively superior when the answer was so obvious that it hardly warranted discussion. But if his family wanted to bring some genetically engineered, commercially bred little freak of nature into the house, then they might as well get one that actually looked like it could survive outside for more than five minutes.

Unfortunately, his family had other ideas.

The pet shop was full of tiny, yapping nuisances with oversized eyes and ridiculous proportions. Some had ears too big for their heads, others had legs so short they looked like they were perpetually struggling against gravity. A few were practically indistinguishable from plush toys, which Pete found especially insulting. What was the point of owning an animal that looked like something a little kid would win at a carnival?

His mother had already started making those irritating noises she made whenever she saw something she considered cute.

“Oh, look at this one,” she said, pointing toward a small, fluffy demidog curled up in its enclosure. “Isn’t he precious?”

Pete barely glanced at it.

“Ma, it’s a freakin’ dust mop with a face.”

“Peter.”

“What? I’m just sayin’. Look at the thing. Ya could lose it in a pile of laundry. Someone’d throw it in the wash by accident.”

His father made a low, disapproving noise from somewhere behind him. Pete ignored it. He was accustomed to being the only person in a room with any functioning critical faculties, and this was hardly the first time his family had demonstrated a troubling lack of taste.

His younger sibling, meanwhile, had found another enclosure full of tiny demidogs, all of them tumbling over one another in a display of frantic, uncoordinated enthusiasm.

“That one’s cute, too,” came the inevitable observation.

“Yeah, well, so’s a tapeworm under a microscope. Doesn’t mean I’d wanna bring one home.”

“Peter, for God’s sake.”

He rolled his eyes and shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. This was exactly what he’d expected. They’d come here under the pretense of looking at options, but the decision had apparently already been made. They were going to spend an obscene amount of money on some little mutant that’d spend its entire life trembling at the sound of the vacuum cleaner, and then Pete would be expected to pretend it was the greatest thing that had ever happened to the family.

Fine. Whatever. He’d warned them.

Then something moved in the enclosure at the far end of the shop.

Pete stopped.

At first, he thought it was one of the larger breeds he’d seen advertised in a magazine, something with a vaguely wolfish appearance. But then the animal lifted its head, and Pete found himself staring at a creature that looked like it had crawled straight out of some forgotten corner of a kaiju comic.

It wasn’t cute.

It was cool.

Pete approached the enclosure with the slow, reverent attention of a man who’d just discovered that the universe had decided to offer him one decent thing after years of disappointment.

“Oh, holy shit.”

The words escaped before he could stop them. Pete leaned closer to the glass, eyeing the hybrid like it was the second coming of Christ.

“Look at this friggin’ thing.”

For the first time since entering the shop, he felt genuinely interested in something other than finding fault with everything around him. He studied the creature’s features with the intensity he normally reserved for the artwork on a newly released comic book, mentally cataloguing every detail.

Pete leaned toward the glass one last time, grinning at the creature’s formidable teeth.

“Look at ya,” he murmured. “You’re gonna be the coolest son of a bitch in the whole damn neighborhood.”

! WARNINGS / NOTES: !

Typical Eltingville stuff.

Self-indulgent post before I go back on hiatus lulz

TAGS:

Demihuman, Pete Dinunzio, The Eltingville Club, Puppy user, anthro, TEC