The lighting was almost fatal; blooming lamps milked their shadows against the rose walls, as the soft dreams of spring echoed its essence through the open windows. The frog could even feel a songbird's breath against his neck, despite the only vacant opening being located on the far end of the room. The thought made him quiver.

If Kermit hadn't known better, he would have falsified the shadow, that he had been noting some time, for a spring tide phantom. Hair had been near to that of a sun, constructed of mere gold, skin smoother than that of an aged ice dancer, a gaze that even turned a house cat's eye. Kermit could have concluded that he had been staring at an elegant oak in the dead of winter, refusing to die with its kinfolk.

But of course, the frog knew better than to illusion such a tree with blatant swine. Yet, it didn't mean that he hadn't admired the sight, as much as he would refuse to accept the ideal. Much to his dismay, the dreaded canine he always witnessed in his nightmares, had begun yapping at the presence of him. He met the dead gaze of Foo-Foo, who seemed to mock the gesture.

"Seriously!?" Kermit shuffled to the comfort of the doorway looming behind him, as Piggy snaked a dart to her target, her countenance more grave than a withered statue. Despite the grieve of her mistress, the poodle was still snared within the knots of Kermit's eyes. It took the pig a few mumbled curses before she finally glanced at what her "darling" had been making a fuss about. Her grave stature illuminated to a sinister joy. "Kermit!" Foo-Foo howled deranged snarls.

"Quiet." Under another deafening demand, the animal finally complied. Kermit couldn't help but to chortle in silence at the dog's aftermath. The first few years had been tough trying to deal with the tiny, tyrannical, dictator, but as the years dished themselves into time's bowl, the frog simply learned to keep the dog annoyance as a white noise.

The pig huffed in a confident glamor, swaying her golden mane under the sun of forenoon's teasing rays; Kermit glanced away, down at the pristine carpet below him. He cleared his throat in a tight, yet tenuous, reply.

"Kermie, as much as moi is blessed in vous' presence, she's rather busy at the moment." The frog blinked in a broken fashion, cracking a ghostly judgment within his staggering gaze. Piggy hardly seemed to register it. "So you're not going to tell me?"

The pig finally cared enough to short a second gander, her mind close to nothing but a ravenous jungle. "What?"

"Your nomination. The thing I just saw you rehearsing for. You weren't planning on telling me?" The songbirds that once choired the breezes died to dust in sudden motion, leaving nothing but silence to remain in empty coffins. Even the knee-highed brute whistled her tail to a halting hush, cowering her ears behind devious eyes. The pig stood dumb for a moment, before hacking off whatever she may have been feeling with a butchering, sharpened, laugh. "Why, of course! I–wait." The swine's thoughts clicked into a forever morphing jigsaw. "How'd you even know about that?"

"It's everywhere. On the internet." It hadn't been a total lie, hardly even a translucent one. News had made it to every starving publisher's article, a side-catch for bored audience's on midnight talk shows, perhaps even a few clickbait titles for greedy advertisements. Yet, none of those had been precisely the reason how Kermit was able to hypothesize Piggy's picking for her nominee title.

Perhaps the frog had a few connections to the Academy Awards organization. Perhaps said frog was able to pull a few loose strings into his favor with a few personal acquaintances, who happened to be judges. Maybe Kermit had convinced these said judges to consider a particular pig to their potential nominating Oscar list, if they simply gave the swine a second peek at her works. Perhaps the frog did it to feed Piggy's appetite for a few spotlights, or maybe out of the love of his own heart.

But one thing remained assured; Kermit wasn't going to give Piggy a darn clue.

"Really? Already!?"

"Haven't you even looked?" Foo-Foo huffed in complaint, as her nose began to twitch against the smells of deception. Kermit gave a pitiful glance at the poodle, before retreating his gaze away from the stationed battlefield. Piggy drew a smile, admiring her own phenomenal intelligence. "Ah, yes. Well, I suppose moi is a dramatic title to have on the stage." With the memory of a hatching guppy, the swine turned away from her ephemerally beloved, continuing with her monologue. "Now, where was I….oh, yes! How is it an honor to be gifted such a . . . gift!" Piggy fumbled for ghosting words at just a ghastly presence of an audience. Kermit felt an anchor drop into the pits of him.

A sickening forest fire boiled throughout his body, as his chest began to crumple before his very eyes. The pain shot through him faster than any baseball Babe Ruth could have smacked, leaving behind gushing holes and diseased scars. Kermit heard Foo-Foo rumble a growl in the pits of her gut, yet his own seemed to be all the more deafening.

"Piggy." In a way, Kermit merely brought this fate upon himself. He knew the pig's attention span when it came to the topic of said attention being on her. He was only letting that obsession grow, willfully. Yet, he also couldn't stand the heartbreak that crossed her smooth features, as her mind slowly began to recognize her own ego would never be enough to satisfy her life. Winning an Oscar award, or any achievement sort of the like, to Piggy meant her whole reality.

For too long had Kermit seen Piggy's face die when her name was never echoed to bring her to the platform, her eyes a little less skied and laced into fog, her bold nature dwindling with each seeming failure.

Kermit knew that life all too well, and he never wished that upon another soul. Especially, in a particular case, to a pig he deemed private affections for.

Yet, in the moments she did receive this battery-lived joy, it was as if Kermit and everyone else around Piggy vanished.

The swine dragged a grumble, snapping back to slice her eyes through the frog. "What?" The small breezes seemed to return at a gradual speed, rinsing the heat that had been burning through the frog's veins like silver. "You're so stuck in this."

Piggy sculpted deeper grooves within her face, tracking every breath Kermit took with speculation. "What are you going on about?"

"This! You get so caught up in you that you just silence everyone else to the backdrops. Piggy, it's like you've tied yourself in so many knots of "you" that you've forgotten how to tie the ends to someone other than yourself." The frog had hoped that relieving the glass from the wound would stop the pain, instead he only bled out.

The pig loomed for a few moments, in an air of cynicism, as the sun continued to drag a curtain of light down the side of her face. Her gaze then refined into a dagger. "Are you insinuating that moi is greedy?" Kermit chained back a joyless smile, "insinuate" had hardly been the word.

"I'm saying it how it is."

"Listen here, toad." The pork prowled forward, causing even despicable crows to shiver on sight. Kermit may have inherited the fate of the midnight passerine, but still groomed such fear with cogent eyes. In the honesty of a blunted sword, the frog anticipated something much more devastating than what he had been informed.

"I ain't a hog. If another, unfortunate, soul wishes to drown themself under my shadows, then I respect those choices!" Well, that had been putting it mildly. Kermit wiped away the exasperation that began to sweat against him. As if a prophecy had foretold from a millennia before, Kermit uttered an incoherence.

"Like I believe that one."

"Say that again, buster."

"What? I didn't say anything." Kermit corked a smile, hoping his cloak needled from the threads of satire would remain its hold. Piggy itched the seams with her carnivorous eyes, before quickly losing interest in the hunt. Instead, in its vanishing place, rooted a notation of vainful mettle. "You don't think I can do it, do you?"

Kermit's dusting features remained untampered. "Frankly, no." The sizzle from the pig's previous ghosting of the frog, who had made her achievement and fame even possible, still left behind burns too deep to cure. Upon the response, the frog prepared his gut for a good swinging, yet the very act of mindfulness had been left to shamble itself. Piggy scoffed.

Now Kermit was terrified.

"Mon chère ami, you think too little of moi!" The frog choked back a yelp as the swine lunged for him, only to grab him by the stiff shoulders. Her eyes swindled his contours, a speck of rose polishing her gaze to that of blood. It was like watching a bull stealthing against a red blanket, huffing and snorting, yet making no attempts in striking its meal. She was toying with him, and Kermit knew the play too well. She'd leash him with a dog net before he had the time to yodel for his pack.

"More like giving you too much."

"You wanna piece of me, frog?" Kermit's slick physique allowed him the miracle of escaping his contender's fatal embrace. It would only be a matter of time until said embrace would morph into a choke-hold before Kermit could blink. Foo-Foo began her ear-bleeding howling once more.

Piggy cashed the poodle into her arms, fogging her affections unto the silver-tongued excuse of a majestic breed. Kermit's soul thinned less than a withered crisp. Much to his dismay, the swine foretold that conclusion, streaking her eyes back to the frog's dwindling stature.

As the dawning sun began to creak away, so did the amphibian's temperament and attention. Without another brush of breath, Kermit exited the room. The provincial poodle complied another low snarl, confirming she had, indeed, won the vicious battle between frog and dog.

The pig, however, merely borne another rivalry anew in its vanquish.


Spring had always been the tortuous season: it wasn't the near heat wave summer had offered, nor the blizzards winter would have incubated, it had its own belt of tools, whisking each one at the click of a robin, sharpening them yearly so that the next spring wave could be more punctual than the last. This particular spring was no different, beyond even that of appearances.

Donald muzzled himself in silent insults and curses, his rope-swinging arms yanking and thrashing at the trash bag tailing behind him. "Come….on.." Under the foreboding morning dew, the sooty dumpster glittered in the shackles of yesternight's rain. The rotting flesh of burger meat and anvil packaged diapers seemed to almost taunt him.

So close, yet so far.

Donald finally let out a squabble of defeat, screeching out his bird lungs as he lunged the bag over himself. The weight lifted, as his fingers dangled in the air in the midst of a twirling dance. Yes! He had done it! He had…

The trash bag landed against the duck's frame, crushing him to the concrete. Donald grumbled in a pathetic attempt to spite. Trash days always seemed to co-exist with their Mondays.

"Well, there you are." Donald tossed and tumbled with the bag that burrowed him into nature, squabbling his attention on other matters. Another duck approached into view, pausing to deem the conflict her judgment. Daisy perked an eyebrow among her sharp countenance, as the clash between waste and duck took hold. "What in the world are you doing?"

Donald resumed clacking away at his inconsistent jabbers, the heavy sharpening of his veins against his neck throbbing into shape. His eyes starved into an elephant's hysteria, as the duck's body convulsed to escape the trash bag's hold. Daisy slipped her scowl into that of alarming apathy, before holding the duck's tormentor up with a single hand; the rest of the attacker had still been crushing Donald's lower-body into the earth. The young duck gave a long pause, in the sudden ice age at the idea of breathing once again.

"Don, do you remember that contest I talked about earlier?"

"What?"

"Yeah, that one. But, Donald, I actually won it!" The duck slowly began to mute the bitter Daisy out, still wrenching his strength out from under the rest of the dumpster bag; Daisy's arm hardly strained under the weight she still withheld. "I mean, I didn't think it could actually ever happen! I'm supposed to meet this real good actor later this week. Oh, what's her face? The one from the Muppets. Donald, is any of this ringing a bell for you?"

As Donald continued his worming, the bag opening Daisy hung from her hand began to tip open. The sour smells of meatloaf and vomit was impenetrable in the still, spring air. Out of the corners of his eye, the duck caught a glimpse of moss-colored meat slowly etching its way towards him. Donald screeched. "Ham!"

"Ham? Ham…wait, she was a pig. Piggy! I remember now, it was Miss Piggy!"

"Ham! Ham!" Donald couldn't help but to witness in horror his approaching torture, as the sweat off the slice of pig meat glowed a urine-inducing warmth, infested within his soul.

"Well, if you're that excited, I guess you can come with." Daisy pondered on the idea further, tapping her finger against a hip, as her eyes scanned the sky for dreams she was always instilled with. Her gaze sparked into a fire, as the very shrill in her voice carried a giddy tipsy. "Oh, we should bring your sister too! Imagine the look on her face when I get to show off my new clothing designs!"

By the time Daisy returned her attention to the duck beneath her, the ham had already hit the concrete, thankfully, out of Donald's reach, who only laid to gather dust. "Think you can phone her for me?"

"Who?"

"Della…your sister? Thanks Don, it would mean a ton!" With that, the woman blindly granted the trash bag free from a life of slavery, as Donald squabbled and squirmed away from its raining contents. "Love you!"

Rotting wood beams, ant-inhabited underwear, and many other things too sacred worth mentioning met their doom with Donald Duck.

Why did he always end up with the worst luck?


Author's Note:

Thank you for reading this story. Much of this story's outline and major concepts is in credit to JBlaser, I've merely written it and made a few twists of my own with the storytelling. More chapters will be coming soon, all criticism is appreciated!

I do not own Ducktales/Muppets, and neither do I make money off of this story. All characters belong to Disney and their rightful creators.