Not entirely happy with how this one turned out, ran out of steam halfway through but wanted to power through and get it all down while it was fresh in my mind. Feels a little forced to get to some of the story beats IMO, could probably use a bit of a rewrite/rethink later on for a little more organic interaction, more fleshing out, more show don’t tell, ect. Also some other stuff I wanted to include more directly dealing with the reason people love to hate fluffies being because they see their own worst traits magnified in them, but didn’t find an opportunity to work in. Nonetheless uploading anyway for feedback.
TBH normally abuse is more my bag, but you know how it is when something just starts writing itself in your head.
The fluffy trudged through the alley, its once-bouncy coat matted with dirt, grime, and other unmentionable substances indistinguisable in colour from its chocolate-brown fur. It had no name—it had never had one, save ‘poopie-babbeh’ if that qualified. From the moment it had been born into this world, it had been a reject, living on the waste, both figurative and at times literal, of others. Tonight was no exception.
“No nummies fo’ fwuffy…” the nameless bio-pet mused sadly, nuzzling at the empty pizza boxes and discarded food wrappers that littered the ground about a dumpster, only to find each and every one picked clean of even the scantest scrap of edible material. It was a common scene in urban environments nowadays. Despite governments and cities implementing various population control schemes, and abusers finding their own, more creative ways to cull the population, fluffies were the textbook example of an invasive species. They bred quickly and in litters, and could subsist on almost anything if forced to. Roving herds of ferals swarmed like locusts in the inner city, devouring anything even remotely edible, and leaving only foul-smelling streaks of ‘poopies’ in their wake.
“Tummy got da’ wowstest owies…” the fluffy muttered, drudging onward through the trash, resigned to yet another ‘dawk time’ of hunger, yet continuing its futile search nonetheless. Perhaps another fluffy might have given up the search, simply rolled over in a cold corner with cries of ‘Wan die!’ and waited for starvation to take it, but the thought never crossed the nameless fluffy’s mind. This was life for it: the abandoned foal of a feral ‘mummah’, starvation and suffering were all it had ever known. Perhaps that was why it persisted where others would have lost the will to go on. It had never known ‘huggies’ and ‘wuv’, never had ‘bwockies’ to play with, never seen the inside of a safe room. There were no ‘bwight times’ to make the dark ones seem all the darker by contrast, only the endless night that was hunger and lonliness. And to one who had never seen the light, the darkness was simply a matter of course.
Little did the pathetic creature know, its suffering was almost at an end.
The crunch of steel-cap boots on gravel heralded the arrival of the bio-toy’s fate, in the form of a figure emerging from the deep shadows cast by distant streetlamps. He loomed over the downtrodden fluffy, clad in a black hoodie and faded denim jeans. In one hand he clutched a baseball bat, wrapped in red-stained barbed wire and swung back over one shoulder, poised to strike.
“Wretched vermin. Filth pawing through filth alike!” the figure spoke in a deep, yet measured voice. In the shadows of his drawn hood, a single pale red orb seemed to shine like a torch—though if it were a metaphysical manifestation of a sadistic malice or simply the overactive imagination of a terified fluffy, none could truly say. Perhaps it was both? Stranger folk walked these streets, like that one chap who wore a jet turbine on his head. The dim lighting of the alley obscured all else save the lower half of his face: a gaunt, skeletal jaw, twisted into a hideous rictus grin.
The bio-toy’s self-preservation instincts, bare as they were, screamed at her. An internal 'Screeee!'urging her to run, to hide, to flee into the night. But something, be it hunger, fear, or providence, stayed her hooves and left her rooted to the spot, paralysed. Her mind raced for possibilities and found none. She was cornered, trapped, and seconds from the bat coming down upon her, and she knew there was nothing she could do to stop it. And yet, the only thing she could think of was the same question she’d asked, night-in and night-out all her life. It slipped from her lips, scarecly a whisper, yet magnified by the tight, cramped space enclosed on almost all sides by brick and concrecte.
“…why?”
She hadn’t meant to say it aloud. Hadn’t even realized she had, until the figure paused. The bat moved fowards an inch, then back again. The fluffy was, well, a fluffy, and far from a ‘smawtie’, but even she couldn’t mistake the telltale sign of hesitation. And so she siezed on the opportunity, though her voice quavered with fear.
“Why… why hoomin wanna huwt fwuffy? Why gib fwuffy foweva sweepies?”
For a moment, the figure stood frozen, as if pondering the question. Then, slowly, he lowered the bat, just an inch, his fingers twitching on the grip.
“Why… indeed?” he muttered, less to the fluffy than to the alleyway. “I… I never really asked myself that.”
For what seemed like minutes, the two stood motionless: the terrified fluffy, shaking with fear yet unable to run, and the figure looming over her, seemingly lost in thought. When at last he broke the silence, it was with the same pomp and melodrama with which he’d announced himself, not the confused hesitation of moments before.
“If I had to guess,” he began, before continuing with a slightly more theatrical air. “It’s because we, humans, have this need. Not unlike the need to sleep or eat. A hunger, ill-provided for in this saccharine, sterile world. The ‘need for cruelty’. As much as we pretend to be civilized, to be moral, the fact remains there was a time in the distant past where we needed to be cruel, callous, bloodthirsty. We developed a taste, for it, you see. And it’s still there, buried deep beneath everything we’ve become since then.”
As the figure spoke, he slowly brought the bat down, until it hung at his side. His single red eye, previously dull, began to burn with passion as he put more and more of himself into his speech. He gestured with his free hand as if addressing a crowd, not a single frightened shit-rat.
“We don’t talk about it. We think we’re civilized now, that we’re above it. But it’s there, all the same, this desire to inflict suffering. To hate, to despise, to harm. It’s a forbidden appatite, a hunger we can never sate.”
Despite herself, the fluffy nodded sympathetically. She had no capacity for the malice of which he spoke, of course—few of her species did, at least not intentional malice. Theirs was a different kind of cruelty, a self-absorbed, oblivious kind borne more of ignorance and instinct than true desire to harm. But she knew what it felt like to be hungry in a world barren of food, and something about the way her would-be abuser spoke resonated with her.
“Fwuffy is hungwy too. Tummy-owies nevew go ‘way! Fwuffy asks hoomins for nummies, but dey chase fwuffy away… dey give sowwy sticc, sowwy feetsies, twy to huwt fwuffy. Sometimes dey do it jus’ fo…”
The bedraggled brown bio-toy trailed off, some part of her realizing that she had come full circle, and that she was describing exactly what the figure before her had been about to do to her.
“Just for fun?” The human finished for her, regarding her with a curious expression. Gone was the crazed grin he’d worn earlier, instead his thin lips were pursed, the corners of his mouth turned slightly upward in a bemused, thoughtful expression.
“Uhuh.” she nodded, at last working up the courage to look up into that pale, piercing eye. Another long silence passed between them, but this time, it was the foal that broke it.
“…why huwt fwuffy? Why no doggies, no kitties, awways fwuffy? Why fwuffy?”
It was a question borne of the same self-interest that personified her species, less an expression of curiosity and more a plea, a hope to divert the figure’s cruelty onto something else, anything else. Yet lost in thought as he was, the figure took it to be much, much more.
“It’s because you can speak,” he stated, matter-of-factly. “What matters is not the act of cruelty, but the suffering inflicted by it. What point is kicking a dog, if it does not whimper?”
“But doggies does whimpew!” the fluffy pointed out helpfully.
“Yes, but they cannot -understand- their pain the way your kind can. Or at least, it does not seem so to us. We assume because you can speak like us, that you can think like us, that you can understand cruelty in a way other animals cannot. Of course, perhaps we’re mistaken there. The ability to speak, even your kind’s distinct mannerisms, are programmed into your genetic code. It comes as naturally to you as breathing, not as something that must be learned and understood as it is for humans. But it’s less the reality that matters, more how we percieve it. To us, it -feels- as if you’re more intelligent, more human than you truly are.”
“Fwuffy… is hoomin?” the diminutive creature stammered, obviously confused. Much of the conversation was going over its mane, though that didn’t seem to bother the figure. If anything, he seemed so caught up in his own introspection that the creature was an afterthought.
“You’re not. You’re barely even self-aware. And yet, in some ways we’re the same, nonetheless. I mean, why do we hate you things? You eat, you shit, you spread, you create more vermin that keep eating, shitting, and spreading. But… is that really your fault? You’re just doing what your instincts tell you to do, aren’t you? It’s not like you choose to do it. You’re driven to do it. Just like we’re driven to act on our disgust, to lash out against you. Perhaps… perhaps that’s why we tell ourselves things like ‘you deserve it’, that you’re ‘entitled’, that you’re ‘selfish’. Perhaps all of that is nothing more than an excuse to act on our own cruel instincts. And if that’s so… we’re no better than you, are we? We eat, we shit, we breed… the only difference is, we have the capacity to learn to do so like the civilized beings we think ourselves. And the capacity to lie to ourselves about why we do it.”
Thoroughly lost by this point, the fluffy idly turned in circles on the spot, before settling down into a ball. As if in illustration of what the figure was saying, the bio-toy was driven by her instincts, not quite comprehending her situation. She was tired, probably hadn’t eaten in days, by the sound of it, and he was no longer acting aggressive, so, as far as she understood it, he was no longer a threat. Or perhaps she was just weak from hunger, too weak to even run?Either way, she seemed oblivious to the fact that mere minutes ago he had been about to crush her skull into the pavement on a sadistic whim. At any other moment, he would have thought the creature stupid, would have thought it ‘deserved it’. Instead, right now, he was struck by the peculiar thought that his current lack of overt hostility towards her might just be the best any human had treated her in her life.
“You know, I came here to hurt you,” he probed gently, genuinely curious to see how the creature might react. “I could still do it.”
“Is not hoomin’s fault…” the fluffy muttered sleepily, gazing up at him through lidded eyes. “Hoomin just has da wowstest hungies. He cawnt hewp it.”
Never in his life had the figure simultanously felt so perceptive, yet so utterly stupid. The writhing jaws of regret gnawed at his stomach eagerly, and found a feast of his collapsing pride and self-confidence. Minutes passed by seeming like mere moments, as he struggled to comprehend, the same slack-jawed, blank expression on his face the fluffy had worn while he’d been talking. He felt…lost. Confused. All he could do was sit, and think. In time, his thoughts turned to what awaited him at home, after the momentary indulgence he’d planned in a dark alley—an exhilerating release of dopamine in an otherwise dreary life. The tiny, empty apartment, one bedroom, one bathroom. A solitary meal, a couple drinks. Not that they did anything for him anymore, but still he drank, chasing a long-forgotten feeling they’d once given him. Afterwards, he’d collapse into bed, only to drag himself out again six hours later for work. A quiet, dead-end job that paid the bills and little else. In this moment, it all felt so pointless, so purposeless.
“What’s your name?” He asked, breaking the silence at long last.
“Fwuffy no has name. Fwuffy was a bad babbeh. Mummah never give fwuffy name, onwy sowwie poopies and sowwie hoofsies.”
“How would you like some… how do you things say it? ‘Sketti’?”
The fluffy’s eyes shot open, and she weakly clambered to her feet, eyeing him warily as if trying to decide if this was a trick.
“Wah abowt hoomin’s ‘need fow cwuelty’?”
“There’s another need,” he stated, his voice low and wistful. “One just as important, yet just as overlooked in this world as the need for cruelty.”
“Wawt’s dat?” asked the fluffy, taking a couple hesitant steps towards him. She was still wary, he could tell, but the promise of food—real food, not scraps scavenged from a garbage bin—was more than enough to tempt her.
The figure reached out, and the fluffy took a step back quickly. But then her eyes—big, brown eyes, he noticed now, that almost seemed to sparkle with equal parts hope and fear—met his own, and she paused. Gently, he brought his hand down on her head and began to scratch her behind the ears.
“The need to be needed.” the figure answered.