I'm not finished with him yet. I was so cruel to poor Dogpound last chapter, I feel like I need to make it up to him. Well, sort of. He'll get closure. (Bitter)Sweet dreams, Dogpound.
He went to bed, hoping for a dreamless sleep, but it was not to be…
He stood at the gates of a huge park, that seemed to stretch endlessly into the distance. The gates called to him, with their open spaces and fresh air, but he kept pulling back against them, refusing the freedoms that they had to offer. He dug his boots into the ground, turning away from the endless park. "No!" he screamed at the gates, "I don't belong in there! I belong with people!"
The next second, he was inside the gates blissfully enjoying the cool breeze through his fur. He sat quietly, enjoying the weather, until he noticed something run across his peripheral vision. Hopping up from his sitting position he gratefully started the chase. He pursued what now revealed to be a squirrel, gray this time instead of green, and almost as big as he was. Just as he caught up to it, it turned swiftly around, and with a loud hiss, scratched him across the face. Letting out a whimper, he dropped the chase.
Bleeding and miserable, he lied in the grass, all alone with only the breeze to comfort him. He closed his eyes, lost in thought, until a pleasurable feeling coursed down his spine, to the tip of his tail. He sighed happily and shifted his head to get more of that nice feeling, sharp but strangely comfortable. "Scratch the other side…" he muttered peacefully. He was met with near bliss, despite his bleeding face, when the hand moved behind his other ear. He was nearly drifting off, when he heard a loud crash; his eyes flew open to find that he wasn't in a park, but in his room in the Foot lair.
He came to quickly enough to see a shadowy form leave through his door. "Wait, come back here!" But they were gone, whoever they were. Great, someone had sneaked into his room while he was asleep to give him a scratch behind the ears. Everyone was out to embarrass him, treating him like a dog…
But you are a dog, at least mostly. The thought came unbidden to his head, a fact that he had been repressing and denying. With the thought finally spoken in his head, Dogpound let out a sigh and his eyes drifted to the small cabinet next to his broken mirror, resting on the bottom drawer. He walked over to the drawer, the pain of his arm now just a dull throb, and opened it up to rifle through the various papers, shirts he would never wear again, and other miscellaneous junk until he revealed a small white square resting at the very bottom. Looking at it, he sighed, and picked up the picture to take a long look. The picture of himself…before, back when he was still human. Long before he had stuffed it away in that drawer; it only seemed to mock him with what he had once had, his own smile smirking at his current condition.
But now, the picture looked like a stranger, not really someone he could connect with himself. The name Chris Bradford written in smooth but borderline messy handwriting at the bottom of the photo, didn't match with the red and black eyes of the creature that stared back at him from the mirror. Taking one last long look, he took the picture in his hands, and ripped it in half, and then in half again. Chris Bradford was gone, he had been for awhile, Dogpound had just now realized it.
Yay, closure. So, who was the mysterious ear-scratcher? Not a clue. I have it down to Fishface or Karai, though. R&R! I honestly have no idea if I'm going further or not.