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Tptptptptptp…
Moria grumbled in his sleep. He’d been out like a light for a solid three days… until now. For some reason, he could feel something faintly drumming on his huge belly. He ignored it at first, expecting whatever was bothering him to wisely bugger off… but the longer he tried to drift off again, the more intense it became.
It soon became impossible to ignore. His irritation grew and grew until, at last, his eyes snapped open in a murderous glare. His blurry vision trailed down slowly, inch by inch, until it finally picked up a stark blob of pink contrasting against the black of his shirt.
Her.
Perona laid front-down atop him as if he was her bed and not her boss, casually kicking her legs and humming to herself. Each time her feet rose and fell, the toes of her shoes made sure to tap against him in a constant rhythm.
“You,” he snarled.
“Me.”
She’d stopped jabbing her boots into his abdomen at least, but she continued to look up at him as if expecting something. Their intense staring match went on until Gecko finally growled again.
“You know no one’s supposed to wake me up without reason, right?”
“Yep.”
Oooooh, that cheeky brat. She’d always been a bold one, but even this was out of line. His brow twitching with barely restrained agitation, he slowly lifted a hand up. The massive mitt hovered right by his commander, easily dwarfing her in size. “I could crush you right now, you know that? One hand. It’d be effortless.”
“But you won’t~.”
His fingers flexed, threatening to prove her wrong. She met his threatening gaze without an ounce of fear. At last, a frustrated sound escaped him as he clenched his fist and dropped it again. “What the hell do you want?”
She finally pushed herself up, sitting pretty, as if she hadn’t just been heckling the bajeebers out of him. “Well, since you asked…! Remember that promise you made to me a loooong time ago?”
His eyes narrowed. “How long exactly?”
“The day we met?”
He racked his brain. He remembered a lot of things from that day, but every little dumb thing she’d asked of him wasn’t among them. “I can barely remember last week, you’re gonna need to be more specific.”
She puffed her cheeks out in an indignant pout. “The unicorn!”
“The what?”
Perona stood up fully, stomping down on his stomach. She was damn lucky it was like an ant poking a bear, or he’d definitely have swatted her off. “You promised me a unicorn if I came with you!”
Gecko shut his eyes, exhaling sharply. Of course, leave it to her to remember some stupid stuff she’d requested as a kid A DECADE AGO. “What, you want me to pull a mythical creature out of my ass?”
“Boss!"
He threw his hands up. “What do you expect me to do?! I don’t think I ever actually made that promise! Besides, I already ordered Hogback to make you anything you want! Go bother him, not me!” He’d gladly provide the shadow when the time came, but until then, she was wasting her breath.
Perona crossed her arms, scowling down at her feet. “He said we don’t have the right parts.”
“...What?” Gecko was genuinely surprised. He’d procured all manner of corpses for his doctor to work with, a smorgasbord of assorted creatures for him to hone his skills on until he could produce the unstoppable zombies he needed for his crew. “That’s impossible.”
“Well, we’ve got plenty of horses…” Perona admitted, only to curl her fingers up near her crown. “But no good horns! We’ve got bull horns, boar tusks, giant Banana Gator fangs, even some Fighting Fish horns…! But they’re all too big, too curved, too ugly.”
“You’re kidding.” Hogback had hodgepodged all her crazy requests before, did they really not have a single fitting horn? It was practically an insult to all the effort they’d put in graverobbing.
“Nope,” Perona insisted. “A unicorn needs something long and thin! We need something that fits now! ”
This had to be the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. …And yet, rather than roll over and go back to sleep, he found himself reaching for the Den Den Mushi by his side. He flicked it on and barked into it.
“Hogback! Where are you?!”
“It’s… PERFECT!”
That was one way to put it. Perona threw her arms around the newly revived beast. Its matted fur was crisscrossed with all manner of stitching and bandages, its skin swapped out with quilted patches here and there. All that mattered, though, was the pristine horn jutting out from its raggled red mane. “Weeeeheeeeeheeeeheeeeh….” it wheezed as she nuzzled it, oblivious to the two others in the room.
Hogback wiped his hands, a proud smirk on his face. “Experiment forty-two is another rousing success, my lord.”
“It’d better be,” Gecko grumbled, overseeing the results. “Do you know how hard it was to track down a narwhal?” But in the end, seeing Perona’s reaction to her new plaything… it’d been worth it.
Hogback nodded, stepping aside to watch the girl stroke her new pet alongside his master. “It took the better part of a month. I told her I could’ve just repurposed a walrus tusk…”
“Yeah, but apparently that’s not good enough,” Moria snarked with a wave of his hands. “Only the best for the prissy princess.”
Yet he’d made sure it was done right anyway. Hogback chuckled, hands clasped behind his back. “I get it. Her requests…” Requests? No, no, too gentle a word. “Her demands can be quite a handful sometimes… but I’ll always appreciate how she can see the true beauty of my work.”
“Speak for yourself. I just appreciate that she’ll let me get some shuteye again.” That’s all he said, and that’s what Hogback would believe.
But… you know what? There was another reason that he kept to himself.
He’d never called himself Perona’s father since that fateful day he’d taken her in. Not even once. But sometimes… he felt like a dad. Like right now, that sense of warmth and pride blooming somewhere in his shadowy heart as he watched her fawn over the newly named Unigaro.
And it felt… kinda nice.