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This was not how Milo had expected his day would go. To be quite fair, he’d almost thought he was going to be sold to be butchered, so this was tangentially better than that. But being locked inside a metal cage with four people, none of whom seemed sane, was not the luckiest situation either.
First, he’d been bought by a man who seemed more like a demon. Most humans Milo came across smiled the tiniest bit when they saw him. Sometimes he would bleat and nuzzle himself a little bit into them, and they would soften. But the demon man didn’t seem to care about the adorable vibes Milo knew he exuded. Instead, he clutched Milo roughly—a little too roughly, as though he didn’t quite know how to handle something warm and alive—and smirked evilly into the distance and limped himself towards the rest of his companions. The whole routine was tiring and dramatic. Milo thought the demon needed a nice whack up the head with the cane he carried. The stick was topped with an impression of a crow.
Milo hated crows. They pecked and were dark and annoying.
He did end up pissing a bit on the demon’s shoes while the demon was yelling at the shooter in the dark place they’d been in before the damned metal cage. He certainly didn’t regret that. The demon’s shoes were nice and dark and dirty enough already. Perhaps Milo could add character to his bland and dramatic ensemble.
Milo was not the biggest fan of the dark. Butchers’ shops were always dark. He couldn’t defend himself in the dark.
He hadn’t been horribly terrified of death, however, because the demon hadn’t killed him yet.
The knife-girl seemed to be fond of him. She found him cute—and by the demon’s heartbeat, he found her . . . intriguing, whether he knew it or not. Milo could feel the demon’s four-chambered human heart speeding up when he saw the knife-girl. He wasn’t sure why, and he was certain neither of them knew why either.
So Milo had made sure to trot next to knife-girl. And then the shooter had showed up and then the three of them had entered into some sort of metal-cage-train with another man who yelled a lot and seemed like a bit of a caricature. The man looked at Milo as though he thought Milo had some sort of higher purpose, which felt nice.
Secondly, he had definitely been terrified when he’d heard the first cries of the monsters in the darkness. The darkness that they were in was different than the darkness of night. It was all-encompassing and terrifying. And the sound of predators was in the air.
Milo was self-aware enough to understand what a sacrifice was. He was now domesticated, but when he had been younger he’d lived in the wild with his mother. And his mother had sacrificed herself and been overrun by foreign wolves while allowing Milo to run to safety. Milo knew sacrifices were important, and he would have loved to martyr himself, to be a saint amongst goats. If only he knew these people. While he found himself fond of knife-girl, he did not want to be remembered as a sacrifice for the demon. He was certain goats who made friends with human demons went to goat-hell, which did not seem like a very nice place.
A fire was kept high in the metal box. Milo made the mistake to relax after a few moments inside of the darkness. He ran around the feet of the shooter and the knife-girl. The demon kept a cane in front of him to stop Milo from running underneath him, which Milo found absolutely infuriating and mildly elitist. He was sure he was a far better goat than the demon was a human.
Third, Milo had to deal with the shooter. At first he was comfortable under the shooter’s feet, but the man soon started to raise pistols. Milo knew enough about pistols, and he didn’t want to be around someone who was tossing them around so frequently. The shooter’s hands seemed to flow well around the guns, and he was shaking a bit as he screamed at the man. Milo went back to the knife-girl after that. He was terrified of knives and had lost many fellow goats to them, but her eyes were kind. None of the people in the box moved very much, and Milo didn’t either out of a silent sort of fear. He crawled up calmly under the knife-girl.
That lasted for a very short amount of time. Then a creature got stuck on the roof of the metal box. Milo stared at it. It growled at him. He screamed. The shooter screamed. The demon was angry. He looked at the knife girl briefly. They all stared at the monster on the box’s ceiling and seemed certain they would perish.
The demon’s eyes kept staring at the knife-girl. Milo thought she could do better than him. She was pretty. The demon looked . . . well, like a demon. Then the other man pointed at him. “Jesper, grab the goat.”
Milo wasn’t one for profanities, but he bleated loudly under the knife-girl. Fuck.
“I’m not throwing out the goat!” the shooter said. Milo smirked at him. At least someone here had their priorities straight.
“Grab the damn goat. It’s not bait, it’s for you!”
Now that Milo had chosen to put the effort into listening to the conversation, he didn’t mind it. The shooter grabbed him and cuddled him in his arms. He was much nicer than the demon. “I need you to calm down. Hug the goat. Shut the hell up.”
Hugs were something Milo could get behind. He ignored the uncomfortable weight of the pistols at Jesper’s waist and tuned out the human voices once more. Listening to their strange conjectures of vowels and attempting to make sense of them was exhausting.
More of the evil creatures growled. Milo and Jesper clutched each other tightly. This was not how he expected his day would go. But he thought it was better to die here, clutched in the warm grasp of a human and surrounded by two idiots who greatly cared for each other and denied it, an ugly engineer, and a sharpshooter who smelled like magic.
Magic. Now that Milo thought about it, Jesper did smell interesting. He sniffed. It was a harsh scent. Yes, magic. He nosed Jesper gently. Do something, magic shooter. Get rid of the monster.
Milo did not actually want to die. Suddenly, Jesper walked forward, his eyes closed.
What followed was a lot of shooting. Milo screamed. He closed his eyes. He heard a lot of things fall away. Jesper moved a lot. Milo found himself at peace. He decided that he quite liked Jesper and his strange magic. As long as Jesper wasn’t turning those guns on him. At some point Jesper dropped him to the side, and there were a lot of loud bangs. Milo waited for the sounds to silent before he opened his eyes and found his way back to Jesper. As they held each other, Milo saw light fall into the box again. He squinted his eyes. He wasn’t quite used to the light anymore.
Jesper led him outside once more after they got out of the box. Milo made sure to pee on the demon’s feet and the man’s feet while outside. The demon didn’t treat knife-girl as well as he should have and the engineer man was simply annoying. Then Milo fell asleep for a while as knife-girl and Jesper petted him before waking up only to be in someone else’s arms.
“I leave you a bullet, to remember me,” Jesper intoned somberly to him. Milo felt something hard at his chest. “Let’s promise never to forget each other, Milo. But I must go now. I leave you in the care of this lovely barmaid, who needs your support here.”
Milo bleated sadly and turned to the maid. She looked nice. He could only hope she needed emotional support and didn’t want to chew off his leg.
He wanted to tell Jesper that he missed him, but didn’t quite know how. So he bleated sadly into the distance as Jesper walked away. This was not how Milo had expected his day would go, but he knew that he had made a friend of a lifetime, and also likely been privy to information the average human would not. Milo felt a little self-important, actually. His chest puffed.
He was a better goat for meeting Jesper and his insane friends.