For @Reddit-Word_H83r’s idea thingy, because he made a comment about a dead fluffy hugbox story and that gave me this idea.
QWOP
Brownie was just shy of a year old when he died.
It wasn’t abuse or neglect that killed him. In fact, he had a pretty good life with an owner - a little girl - who adored him. But well, fluffies are fragile after all, and sometimes when you run and play a little too much with your mummah, you slip and take a big tumble – and it just happened that one day, Brownie hit the ground in just the wrong way and his spine snapped in half, and he died.
For most fluffies, that would be the end of the story. After all, when you’re dead, what can you do? You can sit there as a ghost and watch your body for a little bit, but that’s really about it. And at first that was exactly what Brownie did, hovering near his own body and watching it in utter confusion as what happened begun to sink in.
But the issue was, Brownie wasn’t most fluffies. He was an emotional support fluffy, given to a little girl who had lost her mother in a just terrible way, and now that same little girl had witnessed her main source of comfort trip and die right in front of her.
Suffice to say, she didn’t take it well. She fell to her knees beside Brownie and tried shaking him awake, her whimpers of distress quickly turning to sobs and cries of despair. “Please, Brownie! Please, please, wake up! Please don’t die, please don’t be dead!!”
It tore Brownie’s little heart in two, seeing his beloved mini-mummah so upset. He wanted to hug her and wake up and tell her it was all okay! And as the little girl begged and pleaded for him to do something and move even a little at all, Brownie flew down to his body and tried to move it. Just a little, anything at all, until as he put all of his heart and mind into a single leg - and it wiggled.
The little girl lit up at once and scooped Brownie into her arms, rushing to her feet. Brownie had to hold onto his body as the girl sprinted inside, believing her pet to be alive as she ran up to her father with tears running down her cheeks. “Daddy!! Daddy!! Brownie’s hurt, he tripped while we were playing please help him!!”
Her father, who was watering the plants, was caught off guard. “What happened?” he asked as he took the bundle of dead fluffy from his daughter’s arms. He held Brownie up as the little girl stumbled through a sobbing, blubbery explanation, watching how his head lolled way too far to the side, and he understood at once that the fluffy was unsalvageable despite Brownie’s wiggling leg. But he was a good father who knew how important Brownie was for his daughter, and so he couldn’t tell her that the little fluffy was done for.
“I’ll take him to the vet,” he said instead, thinking that at least the doctor could put the poor thing out of his misery. “You stay here, okay? I’ll be back as soon as possible, I promise.”
“O-Okay,” whimpered the little girl, wiping her eyes with hitched breaths as her father took Brownie and his ghost and drove off to the vet.
“He’s dead,” said the vet, shaking his head. “There’s no heartbeat and no breathing, this fluffy died the moment his neck snapped.”
“But what about the leg twitches?” asked the father. Brownie, who had gotten tired of wiggling the same leg all the time, wiggled a different leg.
“Post-mortem twitches, it happens. All you can do now is get a new fluffy.”
A new fluffy! Brownie despaired; just because he was dead, he was going to be replaced? He didn’t want that, he wanted to make everything better and help his mini-mummah, and as his father got back in the car and dumped Brownie’s body onto the passenger seat, he could see that the man wasn’t happy about it either. He had a big big frown and unhappy eyes, stealing glances at Brownie as he tried to think of what to do.
Brownie wanted and needed to make his daddy happy again, but just wiggling a leg didn’t work. He tried to move his whole body, like he would walk normally, but it took so much focus to move just one piece that he couldn’t manage. But he was stubborn, and so he moved one leg forward, then took the other and dragged himself a bit, and slowly slowly, only moving one piece at a time, he crawled close to his daddy and lay his forelegs around his hip in a hug.
Dead or not, post-mortem twitches or not, this was when his father realized something strange was going on. A zombie, was one thought. Still alive, was another. Possessed, was the third (and correct) thought.
So instead of going home or to the big fluffy shelter, Daddy took Brownie to the closest medium he could find. It was an old con woman who really only wanted money, but she said the wrong things and gave herself away, and as he angrily left her tent Daddy stumbled onto a little fluffy with beads and jewelry in her fur. She had a little crystal ball and a little tent just like the old con lady’s, with eyes that sparkled with the knowledge of the beyond.
“Hewwo mistah!” she called. “What am yu pwobwems? Teww Medium, pwease!”
Daddy grumbled and huffed, but dropped Brownie’s body in front of Medium. “Is there a ghost in here?” he asked, and Brownie held his breath. He also waved, to make himself more noticable.
“Yus,” said Medium with a big nod. “Awmost. Fwuffy ghost am sitting on fwuffy body. Nu am inside ow possess-y, but am thewe!”
Daddy furrowed his brow. “So what does that mean?”
“It mean ghostie can move body, but nu vewy easy,” Medium explained. “Spooky ghostie, show what dat means! Move… Weft eawie!” Eager to help, Brownie took one of his ears and wiggled it as fast as he could. “Dat’s wight eawie.” Brownie wiggled the other ear. “Gud! Can yu move aww of yu head?” This Brownie tried, but it only gave him a light thump and thud - barely any movement at all. “Hmm, yus, thought so. Can yu waise yu weft weggie?” Brownie took the left foreleg and raised it high, as high as he could, which somehow wasn’t very much - and this whole display was enough to convince his father, who watched it all happen.
“So who’s possessing it?” he asked, utterly baffled, but even though he asked he felt he knew the answer. “Is it Brownie?”
Brownie nodded vigorously, and Medium confirmed it for him. And so, thanking her for her help and giving Medium enough coins to buy a few apples, Daddy picked up Brownie and thoughtfully carried him away. What could they do? They both knew Brownie was still there, even though he was dead, and that he didn’t want to leave anytime soon. But a body rots away soon enough, and nobody wants a fluffy in such a state.
“Okay, I have an idea,” Daddy finally said after hours and hours of pondering (or at least, it seemed like hours to Brownie). And he took Brownie to a toy maker, one that used real fluffy fur to make toys, and he placed Brownie onto the toy maker’s countertop with a quite strange request. “I’d like you to turn this guy into a toy that feels and looks like a regular fluffy, but with doll joints that are easy to move about.”
It would take a few days, so said the toy maker. Daddy went home to tell his daughter Brownie had to stay at the doctor’s, and Brownie stayed with his body, worrying and fretting over each cut and stitch that it was given. By the time a few days had passed and his father picked him back up, the little ghost was quite exhausted!
“Are you still there? Try nodding if you are,” said Daddy once they were sitting in the car, and Brownie tried pushing his head down and up, wide-eyed with surprise as his body followed the move as easily as if he’d waved a hoof. He could move! He still had to do it one piece at a time, but finally he could give hugs and help as he had before! He put one hoof around his daddy and then another, and leaned in as huggily as he could.
And when they came back home, mini-mummah ran up and took Brownie in her arms and hugged him close, and Brownie hugged her back as well as he could. She sobbed and cheered and said how she’d missed him and she was happy he was okay, even if her daddy said he had been hurt so he might move a bit different and couldn’t talk anymore, and Brownie wanted to say he’d missed her too. But moving tongue and vocal cords and everything was just a tad difficult, so he just wiggled his head and nuzzled into her as much as he could.
He stayed with his body for many, many years after that. It was so tough to run and play when you could only move one limb at a time, but with time he got used to it so much he could do it almost perfectly. His limbs were stiff and he struggled to do all the things fluffies usually did, but his mini-mummah was happy and his daddy was happy, and that meant Brownie was happy too!
And so, despite not being alive, Brownie was enjoying life to its fullest. One day he would leave and go to Heaven, that he knew, but until then - until his sweet mini-mummah was ready to say goodbye - he would stay with her and play, even if he was dead.
