Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

You don’t fully understand why you’re fully dressed at three in the morning, waiting for your sister to arrive at your -- okay, Jane’s -- quaint little home on the canals of Punta Gorda, Florida.

Oh yeah, because she threatened to murder you if you didn’t do this.

Even though you really don’t want to do it.

It’s only temporary, you tell yourself. It’s only for maybe a month at most and then this critter will be off with some other foster home or, hopefully, a happily adopted family, maybe somewhere in California. As long as it’s far away from you. You really can’t stand their kind after what happened over seven years ago.

There’s the glow of car headlights through the window that faces the driveway, and you force yourself to not completely lose it at the door because she gave you no other choice in doing this and because it’s still the right thing to do regardless of how much you don’t like it and --

All thoughts, greetings, everything, flies out of your head the instant you open the door and she throws her tote-bag-laden arms around you in a huge bear hug. You work around the bags to hug her back. She still smells like vanilla extract, like sugar cookies, like how you remember when you last met face-to-face over seven years ago. She’s still smaller than you are. The hug lingers far longer than it probably should, but you don’t care because you haven’t actually been in each other’s company in the same room for years and you miss the familiarity of being with someone who is practically you and yet not you, not at all. You guess it just comes with having a twin, alongside the really weird but still cool emotional connection thing.

She finally lets go after another moment, beaming with an uncharacteristically sincere smile up at you, her face Yours But Not Yours, same salt-and-pepper hair and pale skin and feminine facial structure. The only difference is in the eyes. Hers are a rich lavender with an amber ring around the pupil. Her hair’s longer than you remember, brushing past her shoulders now instead of just barely touching them like the last time you saw her, no longer in a neat bob with the little black headband like last time.

It’s hard to believe how much things have changed.

She’s still smiling as she sets the bags down out of the doorway and shuffles in, chattering that you two really need to find a chance to catch up in person instead of over the phone or Skype like you have been, and you are totally all for that, but a very small Something shuffling shyly behind her is what has your attention. A small Something with horns.

”Please Dave? The shelter’s crowded, we have even more coming in tomorrow, she needs a home. Even a temporary one is better than none.”

“I said no and meant no, Rose. Why can’t she stay with you?”

“Vodka Mutini’s balls just dropped and he’s going through his territorial phase. I’m not putting up with the vet bills.”

“We don’t have the room down here, and there’s gators and snakes galore. Alligators, Rose. And what if Jane says no? What’ll you do with her then? I know you don’t have the heart to have her euthanized if no one takes her.”

The other end of the line is silent. Bitterly silent.

“Listen Dave.”

“Oh shit here we go again.”

“I know you don’t like them, but this is punishing the whole of the species for crimes they didn’t commit. So one troll happened to cause an accident to someone you were close to; you’re not the only one.”

“You were close to them, too.”

“Yeah, and I got over it. I forgave. I wouldn’t be working at the shelter if I hadn’t. Believe me, Dave, she’s one of the meekest little trolls we’ve had here so far. She won’t be any trouble.” Her voice’s temperature suddenly drops to fucking subzero. “Or do I have to let it be announced to the world that the great Dave Nepeta Strider is still in possession of his childhood Care Bears?”

“You leave Grumpy and Funshine out of this.” You sigh through your nose, rub at your temples. Geez, she’s not gonna stop. “I’ll talk to Jane about it. If she says no, that’s it. Don’t even try to talk her into it, because she won’t budge.” She makes a bunch of happy little noises on the other end of the line. “Jesus, when did you become such a dick? Considering you no longer have one, that is.”

“Maybe it’s the fact that yours is enough for both of us.”

“Shut up. Like I said, I’ll talk to Jane about it. Don’t get all celebratory yet. And don’t expect me to like it.”

The little troll standing on the porch in one of Rose’s old kiddie outfits blinks up at you with one big blue eye. She had said this troll used to be in a fight ring -- there was no trial for animal abuse, apparently things are different in New York. Hard to tell, besides the obvious scars on her face and arms and little skinny bare legs and the eyepatch hiding what you guess must be a missing eye and all the bandages she’s still wearing, some still stained in blueberry-syrup blood. It sort of surprises you that she’s wearing clothes, all the trolls you’ve seen -- on television anyway -- haven’t been wearing anything besides collars or maybe one of those stupid doggy sweaters or booties if they were lucky. She isn’t wearing shoes though, she just has her little bare feet poking out. One two three four. Four fuzzy little toes, like cat’s paws without the dew claw. She’s sort of slouched in a nervous way, picking at the hems of small black shorts with her claws. One two three four five. Five skinny little fingers not unlike your own when you were her size.

“Oh! Dave, this is Vesper. Vesper, this is my brother Dave.” She lets go of her shorts long enough to waggle her fingers at you and she shuffles a bit closer to the door. “C’mon in, he doesn’t bite.” She’s talking to the little troll like she would if she was trying to befriend a stray cat. She shuffles a little closer, cautiously moves a fuzzy bare foot toward the door, then steps over the threshold as if she were afraid it would vaporize her if she crossed. She barely surpasses your knees.

“Okay, so I brought plenty of my old clothes for her to wear so you don’t have to go shopping, a few of your old ones too, if she prefers those.” She jabs a finger at one tote bag. “Then there’s a few books on troll care in this one here, proper books, and this one has children’s dishes, and--”

“Waitwaitwait. Rose, you’re speaking as if she’s going to be staying here longer than a month.” -- you cut your voice to a whisper -- “As if I’m going to be treating her like a person.”

She wheels on you with such a look of fury you almost piss your pants right then and there. Okay. Okay. Person treatment it is.

The troll in question has been standing off to the side, blinking back and forth between the two of you, soft, pointed, battered ears flicking like a cat’s.

“You can sit down, sweetie,” Rose tells her gently, leads her over to the couch, picks her up and sits her down. She looks frightened and tiny on the couch cushion, ears flicking constantly and fuzzy feet rubbing together in a nervous way. “Do you still have your You-Know-What VHS tapes?”

“I imported them all to DVDs a few years ago. They’re in the cabinet on the left, second drawer.” While Rose digs through the Classic Care Bears DVDs you stuffed in flimsy paper sleeves and haphazardly labeled, you take a moment to look at all the bags she brought. Clothes, Early-Learning reading books -- the kind that are maybe fifty pages tops with pictures every three pages and short chapters, dishes -- none of which look remotely like pet dishes, a few of Rose’s old stuffed toys -- battered but still loved -- these are more along the lines of the care a little kid would need, not a troll.

Rose has apparently found an episode she remembers, because she sticks it in the Blu-Ray and turns the TV on. The resulting blast has you both scrabbling to turn down the volume because shit, if you wake Jane--

A noise at the end of the hall tells you you’re in for it any second now. You would have preferred to go in your thirties, probably stabbed full of holes because you were fighting for the greater good, not at nearly-twenty because you accidentally woke up your legal caretaker and she strangled you for it, but nope, looks like you’re going to get the shameful going-out.

“Dave, I swear to God, if you don’t turn that down--” Jane Crocker steps out in all her 110-pound glory and soft baby blue flannel pajamas and furry bunny slippers, hair disheveled and glasses missing, face contorted in anger at having her sleep disrupted. Then she spies your sister and she’s all smiles and warm hugs. “Rose! So good to see you again!” She squeezes the daylights out of your sister, teases her hair, then notices the troll sitting on the couch, who had until that moment been watching the colorful bears singing and dancing on the TV and had decided to grab a pillow to try to hide herself. “So this is the troll, eh? Hoohoo, you are a tiny one, aren’t you?”

Vesper just flicks her ears and looks down at her feet.

Jane heads over to the tote bags and rifles through them. “Hoo-whee. I remember when Dave first arrived, even he didn’t have this much shit. Guess the standards of kidcare have been raised again. Oh well. I’ll go put all this away somewhere. Y’don’t mind sharing your space, do ya, Dave?”

“I guess not?”

While Vesper is once again distracted with the TV, having decided it was safe to remove the cushion, and Jane is busy finding room to put away separated plates and tiny plastic bowls and cutlery, you pull Rose aside.

“What is the deal, Jasprose?”

“What do you mean, what’s the deal? I thought I’d given you ample enough notice to do your research!”

“Did you think I was going to?”

“I expected you to! If you thought taking care of her was going to be like taking care of a cat, you are sadly mistaken. Trolls are not animals, Dave!”

“Then what are they?”

She looks taken aback for a moment. “I don’t know. They’re not human, but they are in no way animals. They’re...somewhere in between.”

“And what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means I expect you to treat her better than a dog. She’s already been treated that way and look what that treatment’s gotten her so far. Nothing but scars and bad memories.”

There’s not much you can say to refute that.

Rose sighs. “Look Dave, just...treat her the way you’d want to be treated, okay? And do it gently, she’s been through a lot in her short life, and not all of it has been good. You of all people should know what that’s like.”

If ceiling fans could hold your weight you would be metaphorically strung up by your toes on one right about now.

“...Alright.”

“Good.” She wraps her arms around your neck. “I should hopefully have this all sorted out soon, and she’ll be out of your hair, so you can go back to your Care Bears and hatred of trollkind again.”

“Hey…”

Jane comes back with the empty tote bags. “Managed to find the space in your room to set up a pad or something for her, until we can get something better. I won’t stand for her ruining the good air mattress.”

“That’s fine.” You eye the tiny troll on the couch. She yawns, exposing long, sharp white fangs and a dark gray tongue. The episode’s over anyway. Time for bed for everyone.

Rose hugs you and Jane goodbye and squeezes the little troll as gently as she can before taking off to a nearby hotel on the interstate to spend the rest of the early morning. Jane heads back to her room and you look over at Vesper. She blinks sleepily up at you and flinches a bit. Rose was one thing, at least she knew who Rose was and had a bit of time to get to know her. You’re a different story entirely.

“Hey, um, we should probably get to bed. Sound like a good idea?” This is awkward. This is awkward and you know it, she knows it, half of China knows it. She nods, slides off the couch, limps over to you and grasps at your fingertips. Tiny scarred fingers, tipped in small yellow-orange claws, yellow-orange like her horns, squeeze like a baby’s would, tight and gentle. You used to grab Mom’s fingers like that, used to try to grab Bro’s fingers like that. He’d never let you. The lump in your throat is hard to swallow.

You lead her down the hall to your room, which, aside from the newly-erected blanket pad on the floor and the Care Bears adorning your bed, looks like any young adult male’s bedroom. Her clothes are piled neatly on top of the dresser, separating pajamas from play clothes from the more dressy stuff. You pluck a PJ set from one of the piles -- you realize with satisfaction that it’s one of yours, from a purple-and-yellow Dreamer line they started making when you were just a kid, the purple ones were your favorites.

“Can you dress yourself?” Vesper blinks, looks at the purple nighties in your hands, and nods, tugging at the shirt she’s wearing and getting stuck in it. She has a belly-button, you notice, a little one that sort of almost sticks out but not really. You wouldn’t think something that hatched from an egg or whatever would have a belly-button but apparently she does. It’s cute. You help her get her shirt over her horns and get the new one on. She manages the pants without any issues. You notice Rose already took the liberty of cutting a tail hole in the rear. Nice of her.

The pad turns out to have an old mattress topper beneath it so she isn’t sleeping right on the floor. Nice of Jane. When she crawls up under the covers she seems surprised and pokes it several times. You don’t think it should be such an issue until you realize that she may have never slept on anything more comfortable than a floor her entire life -- even at the shelter in New York they weren’t really given a lot by way of luxury. It makes your stomach do flip-flops in a bad way.

She slowly settles in amongst Rose’s old cat plushies -- they’re all dressed in funny little jester and bard and wizard and royalty costumes because hell, Rose ate that fantasy stuff up when you were kids -- but she sort of pushes them away off the mattress topper.

“What’s up?” You crouch down next to the pad. “Don’t you like them?”

She blinks up at you, then looks at the toys and sort of tilts her head. She may not even know what they’re for.

“They’re toys, you play with them. Have you never had one before?” What are you saying, of course she hasn’t.

She blinks at you and slowly shakes her head.

“Then let’s get acquainted, eh?” You pick up one bright tabby cat in a black cloak. “Here’s Viceroy Bubbles von Salamancer.” Blue-gray cat with a gray robe. “Here’s Skulligan Malone.” Ginger cat with a polka-dotted robe and a crown. “Here’s Fossilbee Oldington the Third. These are all Rose’s old toys.”

She blinks and picks up the good Viceroy, squeezes him with her little hands and makes a bit of a face. Right. They’re not exactly soft and squishy, not good for cuddling with their stiff posable limbs. Fun for dress-up, though.

“Alright then. I have an idea.” You take the cat army and set them off to the side, rifling through the Care Bears on your bed until you pluck out Grumpy. He’s old -- one of the originals from the ‘70s -- and faded and patched in unnatural colors that won’t wash out but you can still tell he’s blue and at least he isn’t losing his stuffing. “Ever had a comfort object before? Know what that is?”

She shakes her head.

“It’s something that you keep with you in case you’re scared or something, it helps you feel better. This one’s mine.” You crouch next to the pad again and hand her Grumpy. He’s almost as big as she is, but she takes him in her tiny hands, gives him a test squeeze and a little nod of satisfaction. “But that’s the thing, I don’t really need a comfort object anymore. I don’t have much to be scared of. You’re gonna be here for a while and I get it, it’s scary sleeping in a new house with a bunch of strange people, especially if you’re not sure if those people are gonna hurt you or not. Trust me, I know what that’s like. Would you like him instead, as your comfort object?”

She blinks up at you, nods slowly, and with her skinny arms hugging Grumpy settles down in a tight little ball on the pad.

“Are you okay with the lights off? Do you need a night light?”

She looks up at you over Grumpy and tilts her head.

“I’ll probably go get one anyway. It makes it just light enough that the dark isn’t so scary anymore. Probably best for a new environment, eh?” She doesn’t say or do anything that would make you think otherwise, so you go to grab the little bulb you keep in your underwear drawer -- why, you have no idea -- and stick it into a socket near the bed. The last time you used this was when Jane had taken you in, that first night, until you were assured things with her weren’t going to be like they were with Bro and they haven’t been. She’s loud, but she’s all bark and almost no bite. Not like Bro at all. Doesn’t mean she won’t berate your dumb ass for stuff, though.

You change into your pajamas -- you typically sleep in your underwear but that’s pushing it with a new house-guest -- and crawl into bed. Just before you drift off to sleep you think you hear the tiniest of tiny “thank-you”s you’ve ever heard. You’d thanked Jane like that on your first night. It makes your heart pool in your feet.

Okay. Maybe this won’t be so hard after all. Even if she is a troll, you can treat her the way she needs to be treated.

Chapter Text

Vesper doesn’t wake up until nearly noon. You take the liberty of her absence when you get up sometime after eight to grab a bowl of wild blackberries and sit down. If ever a time to research, it’s now, while there’s a troll documentary marathon playing on the Discovery Channel. You would never have looked at it otherwise.

Wild trolls are far larger than you would have ever imagined, not like tiny Vesper curled up asleep with Grumpy on the pad in your bedroom in your old purple PJs. All the trolls you’ve seen on TV so far have been small, no larger than housecats, usually fat and lazy unless they’ve been recovered from fight rings, stuck on diets of rabbit-dropping dry pet food made entirely of too many veggies to be healthy for purely carnivorous pets. Even the ones from the fight rings don’t compare to the wild ones. They’ve chosen four different trolls from varying regions to film, studying their habits and diets and interactions with their environments. All four are female, all four are big, and all four are scarily vicious.

The first one is a Dutch or dwarf troll, a bronze-blood from the mountains of Norway, and her two recently-pupated babies. All three are solid, sturdy, covered in fur as opposed to Vesper’s thin fuzz, and have short stunted tails, broad faces, stocky limbs. As the voice-over narration explains to new viewers, trolls apparently can’t breed on their own. They need some enormous cave-dwelling tiger-moth-thing to lay the eggs, then they claim whichever eggs they want and hide them away to hatch, usually in caves. The weird thing is that the eggs are a slurry of all the trolls’ genetic material, but the parents can still somehow sense which ones are theirs. When the eggs hatch, the baby trolls emerge as fat little grubs and do nothing but eat for a week until they make little pupas -- which are kind of like egg purses, like some kinds of sharks have -- and hatch out of those a couple weeks later. Then it’s up to the parents to teach them how to survive and hunt, and then they leave, usually within a couple months after pupating. According to the voice-over narrator this female’s lost her mate to a cougar, which is devastating. Trolls mate for life. She has to raise both babies herself, one of which is ill and isn’t expected to live much longer. Poor little guy. Both babies are already bigger than Vesper, leaner, scarred and tough from fighting each other over food, even the sick one, though he bears more scars than his sister and has trouble keeping up. The mother hunts with tooth and claw, alternating between walking on two legs and four as she chases down a mountain ram, rips it open and dishes out entrails and muscle to her babies. The brother doesn’t touch anything. The mother doesn’t do anything about the sister digging into his portion instead. The voice-over narrator says this is just the way trolls are. Those who cannot eat are eventually left behind to die. There is no room for coddling the weak.

The next troll is an olive-blood, a Chinese troll from the Anji bamboo forests. She’s younger than the mother bronze, smaller and slighter, more fuzzy than furry, like Vesper, but she’s stronger, still just as territorial and just as wild. She has a thin face, needle-like teeth, a slender build, narrow eyes. She hasn’t taken a mate yet, hasn’t cared for any troll babies. She has no one to worry about except herself. She gouges her territory boundaries on rocks, bamboo, trees, anything her claws can score. Any predator that crosses is challenged immediately. The intruder, unless it’s a panda or another, stronger troll, usually doesn’t survive. She spends most of her time walking on two legs, carrying a crude spear made of bamboo and a sharpened bit of flint, her claws reinforced with sharpened bears’ teeth. Unlike the dwarf troll, she wears clothing, not a lot but enough, and what little she wears is made of animal pelts. Her den, a small cave in the heart of her territory, contains piles of bleached bones from her kills, crude blood drawings of depictions of the hunt covering the walls and decorating some of the bones. She’s pried apart a couple of skulls and uses the most complete bits as bowls for water, which she fetches from a river almost half a mile away. It’s like watching a documentary about a caveman. A caveman with gray skin, a tail, and horns.

The third is an Indian troll from the Himalayas, a purple-blood, and she is by far the largest of the four. She maybe stands at ten or eleven feet even when slouched, not including horns, and she’s so heavy she leaves deep footprints in the ground. She’s muscular and covered in coarse thick fur -- not like the fine fuzz on the Chinese troll from before or on Vesper -- and her tail is almost more of a club. Her hands could easily snap you in half. Her claws are almost steak knives. She’s in pursuit of a tiger that intruded on her territory, not even bothering to be quiet as she thunders through the undergrowth, roaring. For something so large, she’s fast, catching up in moments and throwing the tiger aside with the swipe of a huge hand, then tearing into it. Most of the carnage is left out, but when the troll leaves the tiger’s mangled and broken body is left lying there in a pool of blood too large to be believed, hardly recognizable. To think that could happen to anything that happened to stray into her territory, not for food or anything, just because it happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s it. You’re never going to India.

The last one is a Pacific troll, a violet-blood, almost another species entirely. She’s lean, limber, covered in scales, and eerily, inhumanly beautiful. Her ears are more like fins instead of the usual furry pointed ears of the other trolls, and her tail ends in a fin instead of a tuft of hair like the others. Her eyes are huge in comparison with her fair, slender face, probably to help her see better in the depths of the ocean. There are thin slits on the sides of her neck like gills. Like the others, she lives alone, on the shore of a small island off the coast of Hawaii in a crude hut she constructed from trees she felled herself. The inside is full of fishbone weapons like spears and daggers, a bit like the Chinese troll, and various treasures such as turtle shells, seashells, scales and teeth, and gold coins she must have found on the ocean floor from a pirate ship. She wears simple slips crafted from sharkskin and necklaces and bracelets made of tendons and teeth from various kills.

As the marathon ends and Finding Bigfoot begins, more questions are left unanswered than answered. What about the domestic trolls? Are they deliberately bred to be small, or is it something to do with their diet that determines their size? They were using tools, crafting clothing, building shelters, collecting things; how intelligent are they? How much can they be taught?

Your thoughts are interrupted when Vesper limps into the room, yawning and rubbing at her eyes with one hand while Grumpy is still firmly tucked under one arm. She walks over to the couch and tosses Grumpy onto the cushion next to you, trying to pull herself up.

“Hold on, I’ve got you.” You put your bowl of blackberries on the coffee table and hoist her up onto the couch by the underarms. She sits and blinks up at you with her one big blue eye. You have to force yourself to remember to talk to her like Rose did the night before, gently and like a person, not a cat or dog. “Sleep well?”

She nods, looking at the blackberries on the table. Dear God, you just realized you don’t know when she last ate anything.

“Want some? These are the good ones, not the big flavorless ones full of growth hormones you get at the market.” Not that she would know anything about the market, you guess, or growth hormones for that matter.

She nods and you place the bowl on her lap. She plucks out a berry and pops it in her mouth, almost like she’s testing it, then grabs another. It isn’t long before her dark gray lips and tongue are a blackish-purple and the bowl is nearly empty.

“We have strawberries too. Little ones, but they’re good ones. Jane grows them out on the patio. There are blueberries and raspberries too, if you’d like those.”

She shrugs and plucks another berry from the bowl.

You wonder how smart she is, how much she can be taught in how long. Is her intellect limited from her time in the ring, like wild children? Or can she still learn things and put them to use?

You flick the guide on and head down to the local channels, searching for the educational one you remember from your potty-training days. Nothing you even think you remember is on or will be on for the next several hours, so you head to Netflix instead. Time for Jim Henson. You put on a random episode of Sesame Street and watch her as she goes from confused to intrigued at the brightly-colored puppets singing and dancing on the screen. Maybe while she’s distracted you ought to do some research. You think about calling Rose but she’s probably butt-tired and you don’t want to bother her.

You head into your room and grab a couple of the troll care books Rose brought last night, one on general needs and raising and one specially for adoptions that had been in fight rings prior. These are brand-new, recently released in the last year. You briefly remember a long-ago news report about new studies on trolls changing literally everything in the textbooks, throwing veterinarians back into school to relearn shit and causing multiple owners to toss their trolls onto the street because everything is suddenly twenty kinds of expensive, and trolls aren’t cheap to begin with. Shit, these things are heavy.

You flick to the good old Table of Contents in the general care book, dog-ear the page beginning the Troll Care for Beginners section. First there’s a whole section dedicated to identifying your troll, from breed to blood color. It’s sort of set up like these little webs you used to do in science class, identifying animals by certain body structures given specific traits.

Shooting glances at Vesper every now and then -- she’s still quite enamored with Elmo and Cookie Monster -- you trace a line down to her breed -- blue-blooded Scandinavian shorthair, though it seems more like a fine downy layer of fuzz than short hair -- and flip to the page beginning that particular section.

Scandinavian shorthair trolls are among the more popular breeds raised as pets due to their fairly moderate diet and little need for grooming. Cold-blooded Scandinavian shorthairs such as yours (Blue to Purple) are most commonly seen in areas with warm average climates; there is very little need to keep your residence’s temperature regulated to suit them as long as they are allowed outdoors for two to three hours a day. Blue-blooded Scandinavian shorthairs such as yours require a diet heavy in protein from sources such as meat and eggs, though not as heavy as those higher on the hemospectrum. Blue-bloods cannot be raised on pure plant-based diets, as it damages their digestive system and severely stunts their growth. Similar results have also been found to stem from diets based on common pet foods; drastically shortened lifespans also result from pet-food-based diets.

Scandinavian shorthairs, particularly highbloods and upper midbloods, are usually independent creatures and can be territorial; when introducing one of these trolls to a new pet you’ve acquired, whether before or after obtaining your troll, keep one separated such as in a rabbit hutch or outdoor pen to allow them to get acquainted without risk of bloodshed. In regards to neighbors’ pets, do not allow the two outside at the same time unless at least one is contained in some way, such as a fence, an outdoor pen, or a leash. Your troll will attack wild creatures such as rats, mice, squirrels, snakes, birds of prey, and even small alligators due to their territorial nature and may leave their kills on your porch or doorstep. Do not discourage this behavior; your property will be free of pests at almost no charge to you. Most highblooded shorthairs are resistant or immune to most kinds of snake venom -- those that are venomous themselves are resistant to other trolls’ venom (see section on venomous trolls in chapter twelve) -- and are highly resilient against most wounds that would otherwise prove fatal for most creatures due to their high blood volume and rapid healing factor. Trolls can still fall ill and become injured or crippled; vet visits under such circumstances are inevitable but far less likely than that other species.

This isn’t getting anywhere fast. You dog-ear the page and flick a glance at Vesper. She’s blinking back and forth between the screen and her little bandaged hands, watching as The Count ticks off numbers on his fingers and struggling around the gauze to do the same with her own.

“Here, need help?” She blinks up at you and holds out her hands, and you gently unfold her skinny fingers. “Let’s see, what number was that now? six? There, one two three four five six.” You tick off each little digit in turn. She’s wide-eyed, blinking at you, blinking at her hands, throwing glances back to the screen. Then she curls her fingers back up and mouths the words as she unfolds them again. And again. And again. She’s still in awe that her fingers can be used for things other than picking stuff up and slashing throats.

She turns back around, still counting to herself, throwing her attention back to the screen every now and then. The light from the patio window throws deep shadows in the marks in her horns. Some are shallow scratches, others are clear puncture wounds, likely from teeth, others still are deep gouges that you can likely fit the end of your fingernails into. Her horns are simply shaped enough, slightly curved and pointed at the end, no odd protrusions or anything, just little antlers that stick up from her head. You have to wonder how strong they are, how much it takes to break them, whether or not those scars hurt. But maybe now’s not the time to ask.

Now that you’re really taking in her appearance, you realize just how battered she is. Her ears are torn and ripped and stabbed through from teeth and likely what was once a marking tag that’s now been replaced with a simple steel stud where the lobe should be. Her face bears needle-thin scars, except what hides beneath her eyepatch; you can see deep lines just around the edges near her nose and cheek, and one line runs from somewhere beneath and cuts into her hairline. What little of her hands you can see is also marked in darker gray lines. Her tail is missing patches of soft fuzz and almost all of the tuft of hair at the end is gone, and it looks kinked and broken in several places, as though no one ever bothered to try to put it back together. She’s bruised everywhere. You can imagine the scars in places you can’t see are even worse.

You remember being like that, scarred and bruised and beaten and completely, utterly exhausted.

You wonder if she ever thought her treatment had been for her own good, to toughen her up, to prepare her for the world, like you so stupidly thought years ago.

You wonder if she ever went to bed hungry, not knowing when she might get fed again, if at all, like you had so often.

What are you thinking, of course she had.

Vesper turns her attention away from the screen when you get up and head to the kitchen, and after a moment you hear the soft pit-pats of her feet on the linoleum following after you. She’s limping. You’ll probably need to see a vet about that. Maybe the guy next door, you don’t really know him but you know he’s a vet. Maybe he can help.

You dig out a package of chicken breasts from the fridge and start digging around for bread crumbs and cajun spice and flour and some Ritz crackers and a few other things. Jane’s out on patrol so you can’t very well call and ask her where everything is. You do eventually find everything and set it all out and go to grab a couple eggs to whisk. Vesper stands off to the side, shuffling her feet and watching you. She doesn’t have Grumpy with her. Maybe that’s a good sign, that she’s getting used to you being around.

“Wanna help? I could use an extra hand or two.” She holds up her hands and blinks at them and you can’t help but chuckle. “Yes, your hands. It won’t hurt you, don’t worry.” You pull up a chair for her to stand on while you get the fryer from the cabinet above the microwave, a cutting board and knife, and a large bowl. “Okay, so all this stuff over here” -- you push the bread crumbs, the cajun, and the other breading ingredients in a group toward her -- “needs to go in this bowl here. Can you do that for me while I cut up chicken and get the fryer started?”

She blinks, nods, and picks up the bread crumbs container, struggling with the lid a bit before she pops it off. “Just dump it all in, there’s not much left anyway.” She nods and does just that. You do have to tell her to use the measuring cup inside the bag of flour instead of dumping it all in like the bread crumbs and you go ahead and crunch the crackers for her so she doesn’t get crumbs in the gauze, but she does well enough on her own otherwise and she has fun shaking the cajun spice in until you tell her to stop and stirring it all together. By the time she gets done, the fryer’s heating up and the eggs have been whisked and the chicken’s been cut into strips. Vesper stares at the chicken with her one big eye, then prods one strip with a single claw. Then another. She’s mouthing something.

Is.

Is she actually counting them?

Man, that was fast.

She stops when she gets to six and realizes she can’t count any higher than that, her face screwing up in confusion as she gazes at the rest of the strips she hasn’t prodded. She notices you’ve been watching and backs away a bit, ducking her head.

“Nonono, that’s okay. If you want to count things all you have to do is ask. I’m perfectly okay with it. Shit’s cool up in here.” Moment of thought. “Actually, now that I think about it, I can probably handle lunch on my own from here on out, but I think I can find something for you to play with, if you’d like that.”

She shuffles her feet and gives a little nod.

“Okay then. Let’s go see if I can find it.” You lift her up from the chair and set her down on the floor, and her feet make those little pit-pat noises as she follows you to the closet. There should be some kind of box in here...there it is. You pull out an old, battered cardboard box and open the flaps. “I dunno, I used to collect a lot of shit when I was kid. There’s blocks in there, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards, Fiduspawn -- it was kinda like Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon had a weird game baby and it actually kinda sucked. I really can’t remember what all’s in here, but you’re free to make as big a mess as you want with it.”

You set the box on the kitchen table so you can keep an eye on her while you’re cooking, help her up onto one of the chairs. She peers inside the box, starts pulling out various assorted cards and blocks and marbles and whatever odd little things you kept in there and starts going through them. She seems content enough on her own, so you leave her be. You’re just getting the first few strips into the fryer when your phone buzzes in your pocket.

“Hello-ello-ello?”

“Oh, okay, you’re awake. Good.” It’s Rose. “I wanted to call earlier but I was sure you would be sleeping.”

“I was tempted to do the same thing earlier.”

“Anyway, I just wanted to know how Vesper was doing. I had just gotten on the road back home and realized I forgot to bring her medical records so I’ll be bringing those down with me again in a couple days. You won’t be able to get her proper treatment without them.”

“She’s doing fine, she was just helping me make lunch, actually -- yes, I’m talking about you,” you tell the little troll when she blinks at you and points to herself. “She was a bit nervous after you left, still is I think, but we’re getting along pretty okay. No incidents or anything. Nobody bleeding or crying. No heads mounted on pikes on the dock outside. She’s playing with a bunch of my old shit here in the kitchen right now. She doesn’t seem to be much of a talker.”

“She’ll open up once she gets used to you. She was kennelmates with another troll while she was in the shelter and she enjoyed chatting with him. She chatted with me too quite a bit, when I visited. It just takes time.”

“Alright. By the way, I was meaning to ask: how quickly do trolls learn things?”

“What kinds of things?”

“Basic shit. Numbers, letters, how to make shitty popcorn Christmas tree ornaments.”

“Fairly quickly. Why?”

“I turned on Sesame Street earlier. She managed to grasp counting on her fingers from one to six pretty easi-- what the shit.”

“What? What’s going on?”

Several of your old Pokemon cards have been sorted into small piles already. When you walk over and take a closer look you notice that even though the piles may not all be of the exact same card like you might find in binders, the monsters in each one are the same. The energy cards are similarly sorted. Some of the number blocks have been arranged in somewhat neat rows, based on color just as much as on what number happens to be facing upward: all the red 1s in one row, all the blue 1s in another, so on and so forth -- in numerical order from one to six, no less. Some of the plain and solid colored blocks have been arranged in similar small piles to the cards based on shape and color as well.

“Well screw me backwards and upside down” is about all you can really say.

“What is going on, Dave?”

“Hold up, I’ll send a picture.”

You hang up for a moment, snap a quick shot of the kitchen table with the accompanying text that this was Vesper’s handiwork, and Rose calls back within a minute.

“She did this?” You wince at the squeal she makes. “Ooooo, let me talk to her!”

“Um, okay.” You crouch down by the chair Vesper is standing in. “Hey, wanna talk to Rose?”

Vesper blinks and tilts her head a little, blinking from you to the cell phone in your hand and back again. “Yeah, on the phone. Here.” You quickly tell your sister you’ll do it on FaceTime, help Vesper get a decent hold on it and show her how to hit the call button, and the minute your sister’s face shows up on the screen and you hear Rose talking from the other end her face lights up like a fuckin’ Christmas tree.

You pay little mind to the one-sided conversation as you go back to cooking -- these last chicken strips nearly wound up overdone. You can hear Rose talking but you can’t make out what she’s saying; you see Vesper nodding or shaking her head or shrugging in response to what sound like questions. By the time everything’s done and you have a couple bowls piled with fried chicken and potato chips, Rose has hung up after bidding you both farewell and Vesper’s back to happily sorting all the cards and blocks on the table. You knew kids who used to do stuff like this back in school, even as late as your senior year of high school -- sorted shit or counted compulsively, had issues clearly stating what they wanted sometimes, repeatedly tapped her feet or fingers if their hands and feet weren’t occupied or they were bored. It seemed something casual enough that you’d never paid it all any mind until you knew what exactly it was called and people started making a big deal out of it -- what was the deal with autism? It didn’t seem like anything necessarily bad, just something to adjust to. Certainly not something dangerous and contagious like the PTA soccer moms in California made it out to be. Those typical traits had always just been neat little quirks to you, regardless of how bad or, on the off chance, how annoying they may have gotten in a classroom or other public setting. Nothing dangerous, nothing to truly concern yourself about.

You make a mental note to ask Rose exactly how something like that is determined in non-human species.

Vesper’s face when she first tries the chicken is something to behold, though -- her one eye slowly widens and she stares at you in awe, as if wondering if this entire fucking bowl is all hers to eat and if you’re not some kind of hermaphrodite kitchen god -- kitchen god is debatable. You snap a quick pic to send to Rose later.

You’re surprising yourself with how quickly you’re adjusting to this new addition to the household, however temporary: forty-eight hours ago you couldn’t stand to see a troll on TV, now there’s one sitting across from you at the kitchen table playing with your piles of old shit and eating something decent for probably the first time in her life.

The house is mostly quiet until Jane comes home late into the night, uniform and all, looking pissed as hell and even though she’s grumbling you can still clearly hear her from the other side of the room. Vesper had been snuggled with Grumpy, quietly watching some other old educational cartoon show you vaguely remember from your childhood days that lo and behold, you’d found on YouTube despite all traces of it having otherwise disappeared from everything but memory, but when she turns to see who just came in through the door and sees the look on Jane’s face she bolts. In an instant she’s curled in a tight ball beneath the coffee table and quivering so damn hard you think she’s having a seizure. Jane looks surprised at first, then adds two and two and immediately starts apologizing.

“Shit, wasn’t thinkin’-- Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare her. It was me that did it, right?”

“I think so. She must have thought you were mad at her or something for some reason. It may just be a reflex at this point to hide at an angry face or a shout or something.” You crouch next to the coffee table and hesitantly settle a hand on Vesper’s back. You can feel her ribs up under her shirt and she’s shaking hard and it brings back memories of being in a similar position when you’d first started living here and everything about all of that is making you uncomfortable and angry at humanity right now. “Hey, it’s okay, it’s just Jane. She won’t hurt ya, she’s just loud.”

Vesper slowly uncurls, blinks at you, stares long and hard at Jane, then slowly follows your arm out from underneath the table, clutching Grumpy in a deathgrip. Her eye is bright with translucent blue tears and she’s very visibly shaken, but otherwise she seems unharmed.

“I think maybe it’s a good time for bed,” Jane mumbles after a long, tense moment.

“If you’re hungry I made chicken earlier, put the leftovers in the fridge for you.”

She grumbles something under her breath, but her eyes are bright now and she’s smiling a bit as she heads into the kitchen and you scoop Vesper up to get her to bed. She hangs limp and bony in your grasp, exhausted from the sudden accidental fright Jane had given her, surprisingly heavy despite her thin frame, and barely fidgets as you help her into a clean set of pajamas. She crawls onto the blanket pad herself, clutches Grumpy tight, curls into yet another tight little ball, a defensive gesture. You yourself have made many tiny balls like that in your lifetime, as if they’d protect you from whatever fists or feet or sharp objects that happened to fly at you while you slept from your asswipe of a father, and it took a very long time to finally relax when you went to bed.

You don’t sleep well that night.