He didn't remember much of the night before. Most times, that meant he got to speculate about what kind of really awesome and hilarious mischief he'd gotten into. But as evidenced by the number of notifications on his phone-when he found it, that is-maybe last night hadn't been so much 'fun' as 'dangerous'. Not that he remembered. Plus, he seemed fine, felt fine, except a bit of a hangover. His mouth was dry and he really could have kept sleeping, but he heard Trowa knocking around in the other room and figured he'd be a crappy host to sleep the rest of the day.

His phone was left on the counter in the kitchen. He yawned, and then it turned into a curse when his toes smacked into a bowl of water sitting on the floor. He shook his head as he looked down at it, another piece of last night's puzzle being laid out to him but getting him no closer to solving it. He picked up his phone and started the coffee. Hm. 82 total notifications? Duo knew he was a swell guy, but he wasn't sure he'd ever been that popular. After all, these must've all been incurred overnight.

He tapped the one for missed calls first. A couple from Heero. About two dozen from Quatre. And about half that from Wufei. He dismissed them, setting the phone down long enough to pour coffee in a mug with some milk and sugar. Now for the voicemails. He let them play, starting with the most recent. It was Heero. "You're both idiots." Duo pursed his lips and gave a concessionary nod. The next was Quatre, pleading with Duo, "Please, I can't get either of you to answer. Just call me, or any of us, and let us know you're okay." Duo let his brows raise at that one. That was definitely Quatre's 'I'm at a total loss' voice. Man. Whatever he and Trowa had gotten into last night must've been pretty wild. Then another from Heero. It was just a heavy sigh, nothing else, and Duo snorted. Finally he heard from Wufei. And it sounded kind of like he was trying to hold back laughter. "Hey, uh-" here he broke his resolve and laughed. "Duo. Trowa. Hope all's well with you two and Tsap-Tsarapych..." Then he burst into laughter again before hanging up.

Who the hell was Tsap-Tsarapych? Sounded Russian. Oh man. The possibilities were enticing. Some hot Russian broad picked up at a bar maybe? Yeah, that was definitely it. Duo could practically remember it now. They'd definitely picked up a girl. Or wait, where was she? Must've been with Trowa on the couch. No way that guy was more charming than himself. But he guessed Trowa had the linguistic advantage, because Duo didn't speak a lick of Russian. Yeah, that was the only reason a girl would've gone with Trowa before himself-because she couldn't understand him.

His attention had waned from the voicemails to his attempts to piece together the night before. So he hung up, ready to check in on Trowa and Tsap. That was really a weird name, Duo thought. He didn't know if that was culturally insensitive or not, but Tsap? Wasn't exactly feminine. Maybe she was kind of a dog, he decided suddenly. Yeah, another reason Duo didn't wake up with her in his bed.

Something thumped against the wall of the other room, and Duo waited a moment before calling out, "Hey, you guys awake in there?"

There was an odd noise in response. It was like something scratching, scraping down the wall. Duo cocked his head, squinting a little as he tried to figure out what was going on in there. Did he want to know?

Then came the groan in Russian, Trowa's voice tinged with something that landed between disbelief and regret: "Oh, nu ni xujá sebé..."

"Hey Trowa?" Duo called, getting a little anxious now. At least he knew the other was awake.

The door cracked open, just a bit. "I have done something very bad," Trowa said immediately, and Duo's stomach dropped. Maybe Tsap was dead. Oh man what if one of them killed her?

"Hey, I'm sure it's not anything we can't fix-" Duo started to say, but then he had no option other than to stop talking when Trowa let the door open the rest of the way. There wasn't a woman in the room. Or another person at all. Taking up the entirety of the couch and then some, a full grown Amur tiger licked one of its paws carelessly and Duo almost thought he'd just shit out his guts right then and there.

"Yes," Trowa said quietly.

The gravity of the situation hit him all at once and he had no idea how Trowa could be so calm right now. Immediately he started taking sharper breaths and he backed out of the room. "Tiger. That's my couch. This is my house. Oh God damn it, a tiger?!"

"Her name is Tsap-Tsarapych."

Duo stopped and stared at Trowa for just a second before exploding. "I don't give a shit if it's named after the god damned Russian pope, Trowa, it's a tiger in my office!"

"There's no Russian pope," Trowa responded a bit weakly. He knew this was all his fault. After all, there's no way Duo had the patience and quiet personality that so often earned an animal's trust.

Duo just responded with an inarticulate scream. Tsap-Tsarapych looked up from its paw-its paw that was easily the size of either of their heads-and stared at him. Then it yawned, yellowed fangs bared for about twenty seconds. Just what Duo wanted to see-another way the tiger could kill them. "Oh, you did it this time man, you really did," Duo whined frantically.

"I don't remember doing this."

"You're right! Some other guy with a freakish connection to animals just brought a tiger to my house and zipped on out of here!"

"I didn't deny this. I just said I don't remember."

Duo fell back against the wall, covering his eyes briefly with his hand. But then he drew it away quickly, deciding the worst possible thing to do in a room with a tiger was to block it from your line of sight. "Okay. Okay," Duo repeated to himself a few times, trying to get a hold of the situation. Then it made him realize something that annoyed him a little bit. "How are you so calm right now! That thing could have our guts from breakfast!"

"It has to be a zoo tiger, Duo. It's socialized with people. It probably wouldn't eat us."

"Probably! Oh that makes me feel great, probably!" He held up his hands quickly, realizing that freaking out wasn't getting him anywhere. He needed to get calm. He'd faced certain death in war, why was he so afraid of a big housecat?

Maybe because the housecat was actually an unpredictable wild animal that he had no chance of defending himself against. Right.

"Okay," Duo said again. "Somehow, Heero, Quatre, and Wufei know about this. And-" He remembered the content of some of the voicemails. Wufei had some gall, laughing at them for this. And Heero'd just called them stupid. But Quatre. Sweet, kind, ever-friendly Quatre. He'd help them, he knew it. "Okay, we've gotta call Quatre. He'll know what to do."

"To do?" Trowa echoed, plainly confused. "We just take the tiger back."

"Um, hello! You don't think the zoo has noticed it's one monster short!"

Trowa actually bristled at that and Duo would've laughed if he were a spectator of this bizarre conversation and not a participant. "She is not a monster. She's just an animal."

"Ugh, whatever, dude, the point is the zoo knows someone took it!"

"If we snuck it out, we can sneak it in," Trowa reasoned.

"We nothing!"

The heated debate-or at least Duo was pretty heated about it-was interrupted by a call on Trowa's phone. And the phone was beside the couch. They both looked at it as it buzzed on the floor. Tsap-Tsarapych's eyes opened, and it looked curiously at the shaking little square on the ground. Much to Duo's horror, it did just what any cat would do with a curiously moving thing, and it slammed a massive paw down onto it. Duo whimpered. Trowa moved towards it, and Duo grabbed him by the arm. "Are you crazy?!"

Trowa stared at him and pointed at the tiger.

"Yeah, I guess that's right," Duo muttered, and let him go. He watched, heart in his throat, as Trowa crouched about a foot away from the tiger. Slowly, almost agonizingly so, he reached out for the phone. Tsap-Tsarapych batted at his hand as it approached and Duo ground his teeth, waiting for the flash of claws and blood to go everywhere. But it never happened. With one hand, Trowa trailed his fingers over the carpet, and the tiger watched intently. With the other, he picked up his phone and answered the call. Duo thought any reasonable person would've backed away immediately, but Trowa kept playing with the tiger, letting it try to catch his hand against the floor.

"Yes. Yes. I know. Yes."

"Speaker phone please!" Duo called.

"Hold on," Trowa said. He did as Duo asked and then set the phone on the floor beside him. The tiger leaned forward to sniff Trowa's face and the guy didn't even bother to move away. The stress was too much. Duo knew his heart was going to implode any second now, watching that. "Okay, Heero."

"Duo, let me reiterate. You're both idiots," came Heero's voice, tinny over the phone.

"Hey, I'm not the one who snuck into a zoo and took home a tiger!" The animal in question draped a paw over Trowa's shoulder, holding him still while it licked his hair. Duo groaned.

"You are the one who gave him the idea."

Trowa and Duo looked at each other, and suddenly the latter felt a wave of guilt for some of the things he'd said earlier. Specifically the accusatory tone he'd used about Trowa's insane stunt. "You sure?" Duo asked meekly.

"Unless there's some other reason I received a text at what would've been 2:00 AM for you, saying 'Trowa's taking me to the zoo.' Followed thirty minutes later by, 'I told him to free all the animals.' Followed twenty-three minutes later by a photo of you two in your house with a tiger."

"Have you, uh, considered photoshop might be involved, in some way?"

"I spent nearly an hour of my time scrubbing your social media accounts of your tiger pictures."

Duo rubbed the back of his neck. So, he could see that having been the case. He could be a pretty wild drunk, but usually it was all just talk. Maybe he had drunkely told Trowa that it'd be the most amazing thing to have a tiger for a friend, especially if the conversation had branched from Trowa's life with the circus. Then it all probably spiraled out of control from there until he was sitting across from his friend who was being groomed by a purring tiger laying on his couch. "Heero, man, I'm sorry. I've got a big mouth."

"We all know that. I expected more reasonable actions from Trowa."

Trowa tilted his head thoughtfully, fingers idly roaming over the tiger's paw on his chest. "Me too," Trowa said finally.

There was silence for a moment before Heero broke it with, "Is...is that purring?"

"Tsap-Tsarapych is half-asleep here," Trowa responded.

Heero sighed heavily. "You two need to call Quatre before he worries himself to death. I know drinking and irresponsibility go hand in hand, but this is beyond the pale. You two could've been killed by that animal, and it still stands to reason you might end up in jail over this."

Duo felt for all the world like a little kid again, being scolded by one of the nuns at the church. But Trowa just shrugged. "I've always believed that you can't own another living thing," he answered instead.

"That's fine. But I don't think the government is going to see it that way," Heero said. "Call Quatre and get this worked out." There was a pause and then, "I'm glad you two idiots aren't dead."

"Thanks," Duo said, and hung up. He looked at Trowa, who was way too comfortable with a tiger's head on his shoulder. He looked down at his own phone, sliding Trowa's back over to him. "Oh man," he muttered as he read through the texts from the night before. Some of it was gibberish. Some of it was plainly him bragging about his great idea. Some of it was pictures, like this one of Trowa sitting on his couch, cigarette between two fingers of one hand while the other was sunk into the orange fur on the neck of the tiger whose head was in his lap. It looked like some bizarre magazine ad for a new military-inspired fashion line. Duo was startled to see one of himself, the phone held at arms length to get his grinning mug next to the big curious face of Tsap-Tsarapych. He groaned again, staring at the photo. Yeah, it was great for bragging rights. How many people got that close to a tiger and lived to tell about it? Then he flipped back over to the photo of Trowa, looking completely careless about the apex predator drowsing in his lap. The guy had balls of steel, that's all he could figure. Who else would allow a tiger to be within biting distance of them?

"Hey Trowa?" he asked, falling back onto the carpet and wishing he could go back to when he still thought Tsap was a hot Russian chick and not a giant tiger. Back to when he didn't have to spend his day anxiously planning to either sneak a tiger back into a zoo, or surrendering to police. Who knew how long of a prison sentence stealing a tiger while intoxicated got you these days? Maybe Quatre had a very good lawyer on retainer.

He was met with a tired 'hm?'

"Does Tsap-Tsarapych mean anything in Russian?"

"Yeah. It's like...scratchy-scratchy."

Duo sighed heavily, silently vowing to never drink more than two beers a day again. "Good to know."

This fic was inspired by the joke phrase 'Any zoo is a petting zoo if you're brave enough'. Trowa's Russian exclamation overhead by Duo is like 'what the fuck'. In my mind Wufei the scholar knows Russian and English besides Cantonese, which is why he laughs so much about Tsap-Tsarapych.