A/N: Prompt fill for amongsoulsandshadows on Tumblr.
Lord Tubbington had humble beginnings. He was a shelter kitten, just one of so many hundreds of kittens born in the Lima animal shelter. Their mothers had been lost on the streets, either by careless owners, or just by the lure of the road - they ran off to explore roof gutters and trees and playgrounds and just never returned home to domesticity and routine. And even though he was a very ordinary kitten - a grey-and-black striped fat furball with green eyes that saw a lot of strange, wonderful, interesting things later in life - he was definitely not ordinary on the inside.
For one thing, he was alone, but he wasn't lonely. Lord Tubbington was especially fond of his own company. He wouldn't play with his brothers and sisters. He loved to curl up and sleep, dreaming, yowling restlessly in his donated blue blanket. He would always rest his soft furry cheek on its embroidery, a spray of cheerful yellow stars. When he was awake, he would watch the others, or he would play by himself. And his choice of toys was odd, too.
Objects kept appearing in that mother cat's cage. Someone noticed a pile of something accumulating underneath that blanket, and uncovering it, found five or six phones, all with their batteries half burned out. Area codes flashed on their screens - for London, and Melbourne, and Miami, and Rio.
Torn up bits of colored paper showed up in the cage litter, even though the shelter only used newsprint. Most people nowadays used satellites and Google instead of old-fashioned maps, so this was especially curious.
Or there was that one time, so late at night that the director had thought she was dreaming, but she found those submarine plans underneath Lord Tubbington's round little belly while he purred and purred and looked intimidating.
Then he was caught tapping at the buttons of a graphing calculator - no one ever figured out how such things appeared in the cage at all, and no one dared to guess - and when the astounded volunteer took it out of the cage (after dealing with a hissing, angry little kitty) the screen showed a set of geocache coordinates. The volunteer found the cache and won the contest, but she never told anyone how she got the information. Who would believe that a kitten had shown her the way? No one.
His mother had been adopted out, and many of his brothers and sisters had been adopted out, and he was left alone. There were kittens to his left and to his right, and on the left was a family similar to his own, but all long-haired and white and simply adorable. He'd twice emptied his food bowl already today, and it wouldn't be re-filled until tomorrow. He wrapped his tail about his chubby little legs and pressed up against the metal bars of the cage.
It only got more interesting when the little girl showed up, and the little boy, too. They were in two separate families. Bringing children to the cat section meant fawning over kittens, so the little girl's family stood in front of the white kittens' cage and the boy's stood in front of Lord Tubbington.
"I want that one," the little boy said, wrapping his plaid scarf about his neck.
Lord Tubbington reared back and let the hair on his back stand up on end. He spat. He knew that this was not a nice boy. He knew that he was not going to understand. He was right: "I'd have to put him on a diet."
"Don't you want a pretty white kitty?" the little girl's mother asked, and gestured to the cage of gambolling, roly-poly fluff balls, their eyes all aglow. One stood apart, too. Lord Tubbington had noticed him, but neither had had a word to purr to the other. The one white kitten was staring at the boy intently, like he was trying to tell him something very important. He raised his paw to swipe at his whiskers.
"I want a special kitty," the little girl said. "So we can talk about magic and cheese and numbers, but not math, because math's like bullying, and I won't accept it."
Lord Tubbington mewed tentatively. The girl saw him. She actually saw him. This one… this one was worthy. This one would not be a waste of his time.
"Like him! Like him. He'll get me. Can I have the kitty?" the girl asked the boy.
The boy reared up, too. "If you want to. I don't want a cat who'll spit at me. I want him to be nice and sit on my lap and be quiet."
The white kitten gave Lord Tubbington a triumphant glance. Lord Tubbington didn't care. He knew what the white kitten was in for. Oh, it wouldn't hurt. It would just be all very ridiculous and that was not the life he wanted.
"Well then," the little girl's mother said, "I think we can all just do a switch, right?" As the boy got his white kitten, he couldn't help but to touch its fur in long, even, thoughtful strokes. The kitten licked his lips and looked complacent.
The girl reached into the cage and took Lord Tubbington out in his ratty blue blanket. He sat very motionless, because he didn't want to startle her. Out of the folds of the blanket fell a scrap of scribbled-in coloring book page onto the floor.
"What's this?" her father asked, as he stooped down to get the paper. The girl brought Lord Tubbington up to her shoulder to give him a first cuddle. He put his nose in the girl's neck: so very warm, so very nice.
She didn't look down at the floor or at the paper in her father's palm, but she knew the answer, and that was when Lord Tubbington knew he'd chosen well. "It's a unicorn. Oh, I knew you were the right one. You'll understand."