Stay Away Stray Pet

If Jack had wanted a pet, he would have gotten a spider.

Spiders were often thought of as clever tricksters in certain countries and cultures like the trickster storyteller, Anansi. Furthermore, there was a spider named Electra in a story he had really enjoyed called Capt. Hook: Tales of a Notorious Youth by J. V. Hart. That young James Hook had really held dear a lot of the core values and ideals that Jack held in high regard himself, so he had admired the character and his loyal and intelligent pet spider who had done a great deal to help him along his way on the path to greatness.

But Jack was not so lucky.

A black cat - a kitten, rather, since a cat would have probably known better - had chosen him to stalk over the course of Summer Camp, 2024 and had not left him alone since. At the time, he had been a fox hunting for books for his book fort and tasty morsels of prey like mice for snacks. Upon hunting around the edges of the London Quidditch Stadium, Jack had discovered a warm, furry little body under the snow, but it wasn't a mouse as he'd initially thought. It had been a little lost black kitten.

Well, he'd immediately tried to put it back where he'd found it and even shoveled a paw full of snow to try to bury it again. But the thing was alive and, as he quickly came to discover, very persistent. And, like all things persistent enough to follow Jack around for more than five minutes, against his will and better judgement, Jack got attached to it.

He had never been fond of animals, but many people's pets, particularly cats, had been fond of him. Was that why it followed him around? Or was it because he must have found it at a day old if even that, so tiny he had mistaken it for a mouse instead of the newborn kitten it was under all that snow? Had it imprinted on him somehow? Wasn't that a bird thing, though? Didn't this feline realize foxes were canines?

But even though vulpines - foxes - were technically canines and related to wolves, jackals, and dogs, they had more in common with cats and Jack knew it. Like cats, foxes were more active at night, had whiskers, and also retractable claws. They were also known to use their vertical pupils to see in the dark while stalking and pouncing on prey like a cat. If anyone was going to try to raise a newborn kitten, why not a fox? There could have been worse parents. At least...that was what he'd thought at first, but he quickly began to wonder about that initial statement.

When he'd first found it, the newborn kitten had looked like a nearly-hairless, blind adult hamster with closed eyes and a particularly piercing cry. As soon as Jack had removed it from its snowy prison, he'd regretted it, but by then he'd warmed it up enough that it had been able to wriggle free of the snow once he'd half-heartedly tried to bury it again. From there it had followed him and he had been unable to leave it to die like the soft-hearted sap he berated himself inwardly for being.

Five years. Five years he'd gone without a pet at Hogwarts despite his parents offering to buy him one, and now this? It was ridiculous. He'd had such a hard time trying to care for the people he'd refused to call his friends since year one that he'd hardly had time for anything or anyone else. Now that most of them had left his life, however, he'd found a pretty big void in their place, so adopting the kitten hadn't seemed all bad.

As little as he thought of animals and the way people tended to anthropomorphize them, Jack didn't exactly hate animals themselves. Besides, if he didn't expect much from it, then it wouldn't ever disappoint him like a person potentially would or could. Everything would be fiiiiine.

When he'd discovered it was a girl after studying up on cats and having read various books, he began to doubt that again. But his parents had helped Jack get it - her - all its - her - proper shots, check-ups, and medical procedures, so then her sex seemed less of an issue and he could relax about that.

Then there was the matter of naming her. At first he'd been afraid to due to the attachment that naming was known to cause people to have, but pretty soon he realized he was doomed in that regard no matter what, so it really didn't matter if he gave her a name or not because, for better or for worse (and so much more likely for worse), he was attached to her anyway. So then he had to think of a good name which was hard because he tended to prefer trickster names and most of the tricksters he knew were male with male names.

When she opened her eyes eventually, the tiny kitten turned out to be quite a beauty. Her sleek ebony fur remained as ominous-seeming as ever, but her brightly-colored irises contrasted sharply against her pitch black coloring. They gleamed sage green around her pupils ringed with golden yellow in a case of central heterochromia in each eye. But as lovely as those eyes were, it still took Jack a decent amount of time to come up with a name. And when he finally did, it wasn't something he would have ever expected to name anything, much less a cat. Still, as with everything, Jack had his reasons.

The redhead had found the kitten on August 4th. Prior to the foreign students leaving on August 11th at 6 o'clock pm, Jack had managed to finally get a chance to speak with the young man known as Sara Kohana from the group he'd been in at the mistletoe event. He had asked about Sara and how he'd been doing and much to his surprise, he'd discovered that, even after all he'd been through, Sara still considered that fox-faced asshole, Ginyami, to be his boyfriend.

Evidently, Sara really believed in Ginyami and that he had been and was trying as a boyfriend regardless of his behavior at the mistletoe event. And, evidently, that was enough for Sara. Jack wasn't so sure, though. He asked Sara to give him examples of Ginyami being a good boyfriend and he certainly seemed to have taught Sara a good many things when Sara tried to show and explain, but the more the Mahoutokoro student talked about his childhood friend, the more Jack began to unnervingly see more of himself in Ginyami.

It was poetic in a way. Ginyami behaved amicably toward almost everyone outwardly except to Sara, who it sounded like he only remembered to treat well in private when it was just the two of them. Otherwise he mostly seemed to make himself out to be a villain and had done so ever since the pair had been kids. By doing that, he caused others to despise him and his smugly smiling face even more than the frightfully beautiful face of Sara that tended to normally intimidate people into staying away.

By making himself out to be a worse person than Sara to the public, he got others to realize that shallow appearances and behaviors didn't necessarily reflect a person's true nature and that Sara was worth siding with more than Ginyami was in almost every way that mattered. Ginyami did this because in truth, there was only one person he cared about seeing beyond his layers of a friendly outward mask and the villainous one underneath and that was Sara. To the whole rest of the world, including himself, he could be some despicable monster - so long as Sara knew better.

Jack could see himself in Ginyami because even if he was the opposite of him in many ways - pushing the majority of people away despite valuing their friendship whereas Ginyami seemed to act friendly the majority of people despite considering their friendship to be near worthless to him - there were still similar reasonings. They both tended to behave in ways that ended up pushing people they cared about away from them in order to protect them; it just varied in how indirect or obvious they were about it and the people or quantity of people who mattered to them.

Furthermore, they both may have done so for entirely different reasons, but they both seemed to intentionally try to get people to dislike or even hate them in order to achieve their own personal goals; something few others rarely even guessed at much less understood. But, at Jack often liked to say and point out, it took one to know one.

It was then that Jack finally thought he might have caught a glimpse of what Sara seemed to see in Ginyami. At the time, he had been watching the gentle quidditch beater discover the growing black kitten and take to her immediately, wordlessly and indisputably making himself out to be a cat-lover. Jack smiled as he watched the feline endear herself to Sara even more and seem to take to him as easily and deeply as he did to her. If only Jack could be as frank with his affection for others as Sara and the kitten could be for one another. If only Ginyami could be the same as well.

'Salami' he decided to name her, then. Not because it had anything at all to do with the meat that went by the same name, but because it had a hidden meaning. 'Ship names', as Jack had unfortunately learned, were a combination of people's names in a pairing that people 'shipped'. Usually and ideally, a ship name was comprised of a first half and a second half of each of the involved people's names. In this case, since Sara's name was so short, it would have been just 'Sara' as the first part. For Ginyami, he would had his name cut in half to form 'Yami', which was suitable since Jack had heard that was the nickname he went by anyway. Furthermore, since he usually only called people by their last names, there would have been no reason for anyone to make the connection that he had named his new pet after the first names of two people he knew.

'Sara' and 'Yami'. 'Sar' + 'Ami' = 'Sarami'. There was also 'Sarayami' or 'Sami', but the first was too long and second was too short as opposed to 'Sarami' which was just right. But that might have been too obvious and Jack didn't want to risk anyone finding out he had named his cat after a ship name unless Sara wanted them to know, so he decided to make it more subtle. In Japanese, he knew, the letter 'r' and 'r' sounds were often used interchangeably with 'l' and 'l' sounds, so the English word 'left' could have just as easily been pronounced by a Japanese person as 'reft' and the word 'right' could have been pronounced as 'light' and not really seen as that big of a deal. Thus, 'Sarami' became 'Salami'.

After telling Sara that he admired the other teen's willingness to try to see the good in his jerk of a boyfriend and to give him the benefit of the doubt, he explained to the Japanese student that he would name his new kitten after their ship name to indicate his support for them and their attempts to face the trials of having a romantic relationship together. Sara seemed embarrassed at the notion, but also grateful for Jack's support and though perhaps hesitant-seeming at first, he seemed to enjoy the name, too. Though, Jack suspected, even if Sara might have been pleased by the subtle show of support, whatever name the Slytherin had given that feline, he figured the Mahoutokoro student might have appreciated it so long as he got to play with the kitten herself.

Jack thought about all this as he absently handed over the cat toy to the kind, funny fellow at the register - the six-foot-tall friendly Ernest Witticker - and paid for the total amount owed before accepting his purchase, thanking the man, and going on his way. He had a lot more reading up to do, after all.

As he walked out of the store, a familiar little shadow began to trail after him despite the time of day being wrong for the sun to have cast his shadow directly behind him. Nevertheless, he continued walking as the small stalker kept a steady pace behind him, as silent as a real shadow would have been. He might have wanted to get her a bell, but as a fox animagus who hunted mice and other small prey animals on occasion, he didn't want to hinder Salami from being able to hunt by alerting her potential prey that she was coming with a bell, so he let her keep her ninja stealth even if it caused him to forget she was there half the time. Even when she mewed at him for attention, her sounds were the quietest sounds he'd ever heard a cat make and for some reason he couldn't help but find that rather adorable in its own right.

"OW! Hey! What the - ?!" Jack exclaimed as the young Bewitched, Midnight Stalker decided to unsheathe her sharp claws and use them to start scaling Jack like a tree.

"What, are you into causing pain like Midorimori?" he asked her, turning his head to see how securely she was fastened onto him as she made her way up onto his shoulder. There, she settled and tried to make herself as small as possible, it seemed, so she could fit in the space between his neck and shoulder, flattening her warm, furry body against his skin. He sighed.

"...And there you go acting all cute and endearing like Kohana. Sheesh...just because I named you after them doesn't mean you have to go around acting like them. What are they, your parents?"

Shaking his head, he moved his bag to his other hand and reached up to scratch the kitten behind the ears. "Well, your parents are overseas at the moment, so I guess you're stuck with me for now. 'Uncle Jack', maybe," he murmured with dry humor. "I wonder if you can learn any tricks, Salami..." he murmured with a growing smile as he took out her new cat toy to wave in front of her. "Guess we'll just have to find out, now, won't we?"

Word Count: 2460/400

What animal do you wish to purchase? A Bewitched Midnight Stalker.
What do you want to name it? Salami
Is this a boy or a girl? Girl
What is your pet's date of birth? August 4th, 2024

10/13/2024 - I swear I started this post yesterday, so it had nothing to do with it, but I feel strongly inclined to note here that today I watched The Wild Robot in theaters. Those who know or have watched the movie will understand the relevance of why I am mentioning that fact here. That is all.

10/17/2024 - Wow, that ended up being WAY longer than I meant it to. Ah, well. Thanks for reading!