Jack stared at the cat.

The cat stared back.

Whenever Jack blinked, he made sure that Toothless was in his place perched on the bench next to him. People would occasionally walk by, either on a walk or passing through the park. One child with his mother pointed excitedly at the cat and their mother acknowledged him before saying they had to go home. Other than that, there was no real surprise.

Until Merida showed up.

Jack heard footsteps walk up and stop at him, but he didn't turn to look at her. "What?" he said.

"Watcha doin', Whitecap?" Merida said.

"Making sure the damned cat doesn't go anywhere." In the past seven months since Toothless has arrived, everyone had experienced how easily Toothless could disappear from the area in a blink of an eye.

Jack was not going to disappoint his best friend by losing his emotional support. He remembered how distraught Hiccup was that Toothless was hurt after the incident despite him being one limb short.

"Yer too paranoid," Merida said.

Jack raised an eyebrow. "Remember what happened to Tadashi? And Anna and Elsa while Hiccup was recovering after the hit-and-run?"

She tilted her head in concede before speaking again. "Still. I don' think yeh should gaze at him like that, or yeh'll go stir-crazy."

"Tch. If babysitting Jamie and Sophie for two days won't drive me crazy, nothing will."

"Or maybe yeh already are."

Jack didn't dignify that with a response. Instead, he kept his gaze on the cat. The cat gazed back.

Merida groaned. "I swear, my dim-witted neighbor back in Scotland could think something smarter than this."

He chuckled, turning to look at him before turning back. "Yeah, good luck with tha– son fo a–!" Jack stood up and stomped his foot. "Damn it! Thanks a lot, Merida! Thackery Binx is gone gone!"

Sure enough, the spot where Toothless occupied was gone. The two of them looked around frantically before Merida pointed.

"There! He's in that tree!"

Being careful not to slip on the winter snow, they reached the thin and lithe park tree. Toothless was on one of the thin branches, looking like he wanted to jump down.

"Don't you dare!" Jack scolded. "No! Don't even think about it!

But he did. With how high he was, he buried himself in the snow and disappeared into it.

"Ugh! How hard can it be to find a black cat in white snow?"

Very difficult, as it turned out. Then he search turned into an argument about who was at fault, and how the other would face Hiccup's wrath when he returned.

A van caught their attention. Jack saw it first, then turned Merida to face it. "Oh, my god. Merida, look!" It was an animal patrol car, and it was for the only pound in town where they disposed of the animals they found should anyone not claim them.

Realizing just how much trouble they were in, they chased after the van as it drove off, yelling for the driver to stop. They followed it for several streets until they reached the building, the van parked outside and already emptied out. They ran into the building to face a booth with a man on the other side of the glass.

"You guys picked up a cat at the park," Jack began explaining, "It's a black cat a few months old, green eyes and a green collar, it has only one tooth. Is it here?"

The man seemed bored. He picked up a clipboard in front of him and flipped through the papers. As he lifted one to look under it, Jack saw it upside down and determined that various breeds and animals were listed on it.

"Got one." The man set the clipboard down and got a paper from a tray. "Fill in this form. State your legal name and pet's license number, your address, and we can get it out of here."

Jack frowned at the paper he was given. "But it's not my pet. It's my friend's, I was watching over it for him when it got out of my sight. I don't know its damn license number!"

The man shrugged and took the paper back. "You got 65 bucks? That's the only other way I can let it go if you don't have a pet license number."

"Sixty–? Look, mister, I don't have that kind of money on me. Please, can't you just let us have it? You've barely had it for five minutes!"

The man shrugged. "Rules are rules, kid. You either pay the fine or offer the license number. Otherwise, you don't get the cat back." He finished the conversation by pulling a metal grate down, closing the entire booth window in his face.

Jack pounded the desk in front of him with his fist, groaning at the increasing pain. He turned around to see Merida looking at a bulletin board, not having said a single word the entire time. "Thanks for nothing,"

He walked up to where she stood at felt the color drain from his face as he read the largest and clearest notification on the board.

ALL PETS NOT CLAIMED WITHIN SEVEN DAYS OF
CAPTURE WILL BE IMMEDIATELY DISPOSED OF

Feeling queasy, Jack slipped into one of the chairs in the room. He felt a migraine coming on. The air smelled heavily of animal fur. The lights almost hurt his eyes. The cries of animals in the next room over was deafening.

"This is all my fault," he said. He slumped against one of the weak chairs lining the wall opposite of the locked door to the animals. "I should've just stayed home. Eat that stupid casserole that Mom insists we eat when lunch comes around. Not go to the stupid taco truck."

"It's also my fault," Merida admitted. She took a seat next to him. Her normally free frizzy hair was tied back to mimic a ponytail-style, making her face look smaller than it was. "Why do we keep fightin'?"

"And why is it that every time we do, someone else ends up getting the blunt of it?"

Three times they had to pay for a broken coffee table at Hiccup's house because they fought physically instead of verbally. They once broke a vase at Rapunzel's house. They accidentally kicked a wall in at school earlier that year in spring. And now Toothless was in the pound.

"Hiccup gets back tomorrow afternoon," Jack said. The both of them left the pound to brainstorm. "We have less than 24 hours to get Toothless back."

"Can't we just ask our parents for help?" Merida suggested.

"Are you kidding? They're so fed up with us that they'll just tell Hiccup anyway. He's not going to trust us with anything if he finds out. How much money do you have on you?"

"Only change, I was walking just to escape my family for a bit."

Jack reached into his pockets and sighed. "Only three dollars. Shoot! At best, we need 62 more. You think the others can help?"

"Everyone else went out of the country, an' Rapunzel is in New York," Merida reminded him.

Fed up, Jack kicked a mound of snow and watched it hit the window of a store they were walking past. He crossed his arms and tried to think when something caught his eye inside. "I have an idea."


"This is yer idea?!"

Jack frowned. "What's wrong with this?"

"Yeh wasted yer money on a deck of cards!" Merida hissed, trying not to draw attention to themselves. "Yeh think yeh can get money from performing cheap magic tricks like some kinda panhandler?"

"It's called street magic, princess," Jack said plainly. "Do you have anything better?"

She conceded that she did not.

At first, it went slow. They waited in the food court outside the mall about half an hour away from the pound, where people generally flocked, but the cold and snow made business slow during winter. As it was already past he holidays, no one was busy buying gifts.

Jack knew plenty of tricks to pull off. He practiced magic when he was young, and though he never had a personal deck of cards, he used to play with his father's before they were buried alongside him after Sophie was born.

Merida sat off to the side as Jack performed several admittedly impressive tricks. It wasn't just the simple "is this your card" play, but when he folded one card with a person's name on it to be identified, he later pulled it out of his mouth, the very same card with the person's handwritten name.

After gaining half the money they needed, Jack decided to pull a bigger play. He went back to the magic store to get a magician's hat and went across the street to a second-hand shop to purchase an old and used bunny toy. It was enough to perform the "bunny out of the hat trick," something which any of the children loved.

They returned just in time as the pound would be closing in a few minutes. They handed the man the money and he gave them a paper.

"Just write the owner's name and his address, we'll send over the receipt in a week or so," the man said.

Jack nervously wrote down what was necessary. Behind him, Merida looked like she was going to speak, but closed her mouth. Once it was filled in, the man pressed a buzzer on his side and the security door on their end popped open.

"Go in and get your cat," he said with disinterest.

The sight in the next room over was unsettling. Several cats and dogs were in cages all over the room, reminiscent of jail cells. Some of them looked hurt, and others looked malnourished. In each cell there were two bowls, for food and water. It was obvious they weren't being treated properly.

"Look at 'em," Merida said in disgust. "These blasted pound has no respect for creatures." She stopped walking and caught sight of another open door leading to maybe behind the building. Two men were taking caged animals onto a van. They were most likely taking them away after their week had passed.

Jack leaned down. "Toothless!"

The black cat was in a cage alongside a white cat inside. The white cat had long and dirty fur, giving it a fluffy appearance. They were the only two animals inside the cage.

"Let's get you outta here before Hiccup kills all of us." He pulled open the hatch of the cage and picked Toothless up in his arms. He was about to shut it again when the white cat suddenly lept out. "Wait, no! Come back!"

The cat proved to be too fast for them as it darted out the open door. None of the men loading the truck seemed to notice.

The animal activity increased as they seemed to notice one of them had escaped. The barking grew louder and the cats clawed at the door.

"We better go before they realize what's 'appened," Merida said, pulling on Jack's arm.

"Wait!" He passed Toothless over to her before opening another cage. He pulled out a white cat with vastly shorter white fur, but it was just as filthy. He cringed in pain as it clawed at his wrist, trying to escape his grasp. Jack persisted and was forced to throw the cat into the first cage, slamming it shut. making sure they were both locked, he took Toothless back into his own arms. "Let's get out of here."

They left the building and walked at a brisk pace until they reached the park again. Jack let out a heavy breath.

"I should go home," Merida said. "I told me Mum I'd be back hours ago."

"Yeah, me too," Jack said. "Thanks, Merida."

Merida frowned. "I didn't do much. Anything, actually."

"But you stayed. Hiccup is maybe the only thing we agree on, the poor kid is fragile enough."

She scoffed. "Look at you, sounding like you're three hundred years old."

Jack couldn't help but gloat, positioning Toothless in his arms again. "Oh? Well, perhaps that's why I'm so wise."

"Sure, keep telling yerself that."

The two of them said their goodbyes after that, heading back home. As he expected, Jack was met with an angry mother over why he hadn't been answering her calls. With such a long walk, Jack had been able to concoct a story in his head. He just had to hope his mom didn't hear that Merida was also late that night and she get the wrong idea.


The man at the pound made sure that everything was in order when the door opened. He looked up and saw who it was. "Oh, hey, boss."

The boss looked at him. "You said you found the cat," he said in his deep, gruff voice.

"Oh, yeah. The cat's owner came pick it up or something, I dunno, but at least we got the money for it." He proudly held up the cash that was given to him. Suddenly, a chair was thrown threw the glass, making him jump out of the way.

"YOU IDIOT!" The boss grabbed the man by his throat in a large hand and pulled him close to the border of the booth. "That cat is the last of an an extinct breed! You just cost us millions of dollars!" He threw the man to the wall, which was enough to knock him unconscious.

Shuffling threw the papers, he pulled out a paper with a signature on it, followed by an address.

Jackson Overland, the paper read, followed by the boy's address.

The boss smiled. "Perfect."


Author's Notes:

As you can see, this story is not exactly on linear order. A plot device here, a mystery there. Also, this story is not as one-shot as I thought it would be. I should probably take that off the synopsis. Which I will, once this chapter is uploaded.

And no, the motive is not so cut and dry. There's something even deeper going on, which will be revealed by the end of this story. Thanks for sticking this long, and of course, more will come.

Word Count: 2440

~CoronaCrown~