Ehehehe yessss! Thank you Anon! This one got longer, and I may be stretching the original intent of the ask meme, but, ehhh. This was fun. xD
CW: Dehumanization, pet whumpee, triggered response, some fluff.
Pasha doesn’t mean to say it - but the farm house is hectic on the best of days. She’s got three big dogs, all at least waist-height and over 160 pounds, and when they run amuck through the house it’s a fucking zoo. And the boy named Mutt - the boy whose name she keeps avoiding, the boy who still only answers to the worst possible words - he is very good at making himself disappear.
“Would you - stop that. No, Zan, get off the couch-” Zan, a big, floppy-eared German Shepard mix, wags his tail at her from the couch, whilst making no move to get off it, and Pasha growls. “Bad dog, Zan! Get down, down boy!”
There’s barking bouncing through the hallways, loud enough that Pasha almost misses the punched-out whimper and the quiet thump.
Zan barks again, then jumps off the couch and prances over to her, head held high like he’s done something praise-worthy.
“You’re a horrible dog,” Pasha tells him, and Zan’s tail wags harder. “Ugh.” Pasha grabs his collar and turns, ready to put him back outside, and then skids to a stop.
The boy is almost out of sight; the couch is pushed up against the far wall under the window, and Mutt is scrunched in on himself, halfway underneath the coffee table. Pasha draws in a breath, about to speak, and the boy whimpers again and curls thin, bruised hands over his head.
“Fuck,” she mutters. “Zan, come here. No - no, come here.” Pasha is in no mood to be disobeyed, and Zan trots reluctantly at her side as she leads him down the hall and then pushes the old screen door open with her foot. “Go on.” Zan bounds into the backyard happily, and Pasha watches, then sighs, scrubs a hand down her face.
When she kneels by his side, the boy named Mutt whimpers softly, and it’s sad and scared, like she’s come to deliver God’s judgment.
“Hey, puppy,” she murmurs, and Pasha hates that, too - but the therapist had said that too much change too fast would only set him back. And a puppy is still a kind of dog.
There’s a wet sniffling, and Pasha blinks in surprise. She’s seen this poor boy scream, beg, cry, struggle - but tears usually come at the end, not the beginning.
“Buddy?” She leans forward, places the lightest possible hand on the center of his back, and Mutt flinches hard enough to make her jump. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she tells him sadly. Mutt lifts his head timidly, peers up at her through his short fringe of hair, still growing back from being buzzed. There’s a question there, and Pasha just nods encouragingly, pets her hand down his back. He responds well to touch, Pasha has found - as long as she gentles him into it first. “You can speak, puppy,” she murmurs, knowing that he won’t unless she expressly tells him.
Even so, it’s a long moment before Mutt’s raspy, quiet voice can be heard.
“… y-you sssssaid, you s-said.” He shakes his head, squeezes his eyes shut, like he’s physically trying to force himself not to stammer. “Bad do-og. Bad. Bad dog, bad. B-bad dogs go, go in the barn. Bad dogs go in the barn b-but -” And then he looks up again, and the pleading in his eyes is like a blow to the gut. “Please,” he whines, “please, Miss, don’t put me back in the barn. I’ll, I can be better, I’ll d-do better-”
There’s an abrupt twisting in Pasha’s gut, disgust and horror and shame, and she jerks her hand back without thinking - but losing the single point of contact only seems to make it worse.
“No, no please!” The boy is halfway to wailing as he begs, and if not for the fact that he’d called her Miss Pasha would think he was seeing someone else. “Please don’t put me back Miss, please don’t put me back-”
“Okay, okay, enough,” she says, and the boy whimpers and clamps a hand over his own mouth, like without it he would just keep whining for mercy. “You’re not going back in the barn,” Pasha tells him. “You’re not. You’re - you, uhm.” Pasha frowns, hesitates. She’s not the nurturing type, and she never has been - but this young man suddenly thrust into her care needs her to be gentle with him.
“You’re a very good, um - boy. You’re a good boy.” She hears it unspoken; good dog. He’s still cowering, still hunched in on himself like he wants to blend in with the carpet. Pasha reaches out again, and the skin of his back twitches under her fingers. He lets out a little punched-out breath, like her touch burns. But she just holds it there, and gently starts to pet her fingers up and down his spine; not that much contact, just the tips of her fingers, up and down, up and down.
He relaxes in increments, and Pasha carefully trails her fingers over old scars, studiously avoiding the new ones. When her touch drifts up to his neck he shivers and turns his head towards her, and it’s such a small movement that it could have been an accident.
“You’re not going back to that awful place,” she murmurs. “Not ever.”
The boy called Mutt doesn’t respond, because she hasn’t ordered him to. But the tension leaves him slowly, and Pasha crouches there, between her couch and the end table, and strokes his back until he isn’t as frightened anymore.
