"Gross!" I shouted. "Mycroft!" But he was just sitting there, looming menacingly, as if daring the thing to move. I picked it up gingerly, took it to the bathroom and rinsed the strings of cat mucous off.
It didn't look familiar. Sarah's got a lot of nerd memorabilia sitting around the house but this one I couldn't quite place. I'd seen enough cheap, corporate merch and the custom-painted or original pieces to know the difference from the many cons Sarah insisted on dragging me to. And this thing looked expensive. Like, not a kid's toy. Not an action figure. Not a "collectible", but a genuine piece of goddamned art.
"Shit, Mycroft," I told the still yowling cat, "if you've even ruined a multi-thousand dollar sculpture I will shave you, swear to God."
He only hissed at me.
I laid the figure carefully in my dresser where Mycroft couldn't get it, and thought no more of it.
An hour later, I discovered the Legolas didn't arrive alone. I found a Gimli and the remnants of a suspiciously familiar cardboard box in the entry way as I was on my way to work and had no time to clean it up.
"Godammit, Mycroft!" I shouted, picking up the figurine and shutting it in a drawer. "You're going to be bald as a baby's backside when I get home!"
I got home fifteen hours later, threw my keys in the bowl, fed the damned cat, and went promptly to bed. And if I stepped on a Legolas figure and swore to myself while shoving it back in my dresser without wondering how the hell the cat had managed to get to it, my excuse is I was just too tired to care.