Hello all, once again, welcome to another feels-wrenching fanfiction. This one actually brought tears to my eyes. This is one story I'm very proud of, but I'm still working on the 2nd chapter, so try to sit tight while I shit out another chapter. Well, I hope you enjoy this, please favorite, follow, and review! All reviews will be taken into thought, as I need many bits of help with my writing!

Until the next chapter!

-Puffin

The minute I walked into the classroom I was met with a small scream. I furrowed my eyebrows and blinked. I wasn't that scary, was I? I had gotten the job to help kids, not scare them to death. And to get rid of the community service time I had neglected to do the last 3 years of high school.

A young woman at a tiny table waved me over to her, smiling sympathetically. She was dressed in bright colors, orange and yellow and peach and teal and blue, long unruly hair a dark tinge of red. I wasn't sure if it was dyed that way or not.

She was sitting at the small plastic table on her knees as a short brown haired girl with a knitted blue hat colored a cat with fierce abandon. She paused and looked up at me, gray eyes widening.

I took a step back, already having enough with the screams.

But instead, she smiled. She smiled, and turned back to her page, finishing the now brown cat.

"This is Nepeta." The woman said, flattening her sticky name tag back onto her yellow shirt. Aradia, it said. "She likes cats."

"I noticed." I peered over as the girl turned the page of the cat abundant coloring book. She pulled out a green crayon, holding it like a spear.

"Man of few words, huh? We'll soon weed that habit out of you. Not that there's many of us." She was right; there was only the three of us in the room right now. Aradia jabbed me in the ribs with her blue crayon as she stood, smiling widely. "You learn to catch up on everyone's words here." She waved me over to a table her height. "I'll hook you up with a name tag."

I followed her swaggery steps and watched her twirl her pen in her maroon painted fingers as she pulled out the nametags.

"Equius." I said.

"I know that, I just don't know what to draw on your name tag!" Aradia looked up at me quizzically. "We draw the things we like on our name tags." She pointed to the frog perched on the A of her name.

"Oh. Um… I like horses?" I said uncertainly.

"Okay, cool! I like horses too!" Aradia swept her hand across the tag, scrawling my name onto the tag in cursive. She drew a horse nickering in the top corner of the tag.

"Nice horse. You draw?"

Aradia nodded vigorously as she pulled the tag from the paper. "Oh yes, I'm majoring in art in college right now." She patted the name tag onto my chest, smiling.

I blinked. "I thought you would major in something different if you were here."

"Well, you're here too, mister." Aradia winked.

Suddenly the door was opened with a little too much force and a boy was dragged through; face scrunched into an angry expression. His father looked at Aradia with pity; then dropped the boy. The door closed swiftly.

"I'll take care of this. How about you go color with Nepeta?" Aradia suggested, advancing over the boy with her skirt swishing. He seemed very upset to be here, sitting on the floor defiantly.

I remembered my task, and sat down in the miniscule chair next to the just as small girl. My chin rested on my knees, which probably looked horribly comedic.

Nepeta looked up at me from her messy pink cat, and then gave me toothy grin. "You're here to color with me!"

I smiled hesitantly, picking up an orange crayon. "Yeah, I am."

"How about…" She looked at my nametag. "You like horses?"

I nodded, a bit more a smile spreading onto my face. "I do. Do you?"

"I love horses! Almost as much as cats!" Nepeta was scrolling through her coloring book for something to color.

I picked up an uncolored cat page, its face ripped. "Why does this cat have no color?"

"Because it's ugly. No one likes that cat. She's ugly and no one likes her." Nepeta scrunched her face at the page, finding a sparkly indigo crayon in the box and pressing it to the paper.

"Maybe the reason she's ugly is because she has no color." I began to color the cat's face carefully with my orange crayon. "When cats are colorful, they're pretty."

"No!" Nepeta snatched the crayon from my hand. "She's ugly! No one likes her because she's ugly! Ugly!"

I picked up another crayon, coloring its paws turquoise. "See, she's pretty already."

Nepeta hesitated from her plan to thieve away my other crayon. "Is she going to be a rainbow cat?"

"Maybe."

"But rainbow cats don't exist!" Nepeta insisted, leaning over my arm to look at the cat.

"Well then, she's a very special cat." I picked up another crayon, coloring a stripe dark green. "You can help me. But she has to be very pretty. So we have to be careful."

Nepeta nodded with vigor, taking her sparkly crayon and coloring the cat's ears with precision and concentration.

Just then a loud scream came from the other side of the room, and the crayon went skidding across the paper. I whipped my head around to see Aradia trying to calm the boy that had come in very upset earlier. He was shrieking unintelligible words, tears threatening to overflow onto his cheeks. I noticed one of his eyes was a light brown, nearly red, while the other was blue. Pigment mutation, I guessed.

Aradia waved to me as she kneeled over the boy, and I turned back to Nepeta. She looked very worried, staring at the sparkly purple streak on the paper leading from the cat's ear.

"She's ugly again." She said dejectedly.

"No, she's even more special now." I reassured her.

We finished the cat and Nepeta went back to her solo coloring. I stood up, stretching my cramped legs, and steered over to Aradia. She was leaning against a wall, staring into space as the trouble making blond boy sat on the carpet reading The Outsiders.

I tapped her on the shoulder, and she blinked out of her daydream.

"Straighten everything out?" I said under my breath.

"No need to whisper, he's got his headphones in. He doesn't want to talk to me." Aradia looked down at him with annoyance, but I noted a small bit of-was it?-empathy in her eyes. "That's Sollux. He only comes here on weekends. Nepeta comes every day."

"You don't seem to get much traffic in here." I looked around room; it felt very empty.

"It's usually like this." Aradia sighed and shrugged, "Another boy comes sometimes-oh, and Tavros too! But they only come occasionally. I guess it's not as fun as it used to be." She looked so sad; I nearly joined in her pitiful frown.

"That must suck. Though sometimes less is more." I tried to bring out the best, but failed miserably.

"Maybe." Aradia's brown eyes suddenly sparked. "Do you like Nepeta? She seemed to really like you. She was a little too excited when you came in."

"I wondered why someone screamed…" I pondered this, and then flinched in surprise when the door opened behind me.

A young woman was looking around the room when I turned, height dwarfed by her long hair. She approached Aradia, a smile never leaving her lips.

"Nepeta's over there. She colored a lot of cats today." Aradia smiled at the woman. "Oh, yes, greetings. Meulin this is Equius our new aide. Equius this is Meulin Leijon, Nepeta's mother."

Nepeta was suddenly there, papers gathered in her hands. "Mommy!" She squealed, earning a glare from Sollux. "I colored lots of cats today! And Equius helped me! We made an ugly cat really pretty!" She shoved the paper in her mother's face, a big smile across her cheeks.

"That's beautiful Nepeta! Do you want to put it on the fridge?" Meulin grabbed for the paper, but Nepeta pulled it to her chest.

"No! I'm going to give it Equius! Because he's pretty like that cat!" Nepeta raised the paper into the air as high as she could, standing on her tiptoes as she held it up to me. It reached about my nametag, and I took the paper carefully.

"Thank you Nepeta." I smiled sincerely, watching her giggle and grab onto her mother's hand, dissipating out the door.

"I told you that you would open up." Aradia elbowed me, watching Meulin and Nepeta walk away as the door creaked shut.

As I looked at the cat on the paper again I felt a nudge at my foot and looked down. It was Sollux. He glared up at me with irritated eyes, murmuring something under his breath.

"Hmm?" I bent over, trying to hear him.

"None of your business, okay?" He scrunched up into a ball and continued his book.

I glanced at Aradia, who shrugged. "Don't blame him. He had no chance of not being like this. Well he did, but not that much of one." She ruffled his head lightly, and began to clean up Nepeta's crayons. I joined her, ignoring the mutters.

Sollux's father finally arrived, and pulled the boy away. I opened his book, remembering when I had read it in English class in middle school. I placed it on a small shelf, putting a bookmark in the spot where it had been placed open.

I felt a tap on my shoulder, and turned.

Aradia pulled my nametag off my shirt, holding its sticky edges carefully. "You can go now; I'll log your hours or whatever tomorrow."

I nodded, pocketing the page. "Good night Aradia. Today was nice."

"Isn't it always?" Aradia's tone was bittersweet