you take the dark and carve me out a home

Pets! We know them, we probably have positive associations with at least one type of pet, and they've appeared in our creative endeavors since time immemorial. Considering that, we felt that a challenge revolving around them would be appropriate.

Challenge #2: Pets of Fandom

Loosely defined! Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!


Okay, so I'm going about this one in two parts.

First, some sharing of historic Real Cat Fiction. This was my way of cheering myself up back in 2020-21 - I basically hated lockdown (for context to anyone who doesn't know me that well or at all, my family is pretty much scattered across the UK and I didn't end up seeing them for over a year even in the times when there was some loosening of restrictions). If you're in the UK you will be well aware of the various political scandals at the time (and even if you're not in the UK you probably picked up some of it). So this is basically Larry the Cat (and the other Whitehall felines Gladstone and Palmerston) getting the better of the government.

https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/works?fandom_id=295954

(I've only linked to my own fics here, although more Larry the Cat does exist - I'll spare you the horror that is Boris Johnson getting pegged by Liz Truss.)

And for something new create for the challenge, here's a fic about Gretchen from Dark (a poodle who is sent through time from 1953 to 1986 and reunited with her original owners in the future):

Nothing here made any sense to Gretchen.

When Helge had thrown the stick into the caves for her, it had seemed just like any other time when he, or Claudia, or Egon or Doris, would have done so; Gretchen would find it, bring it back to whoever had thrown it, and that was what she thought would happen this time. But now she doesn’t recognise the house she’s been brought back to, and she’s confused by the people she’s with – the middle aged woman and the older man smell like Claudia and Egon, they sound like them, and Gretchen even thinks she can see the people she knew in their older faces now. But she still finds herself looking for the eleven year old Claudia, cannot understand why Doris Tiedemann no longer seems to be living in the family home, and is still getting used to this other person, the one called Regina (and her friend Aleksander who is often around), who seems to live here now but isn’t someone Gretchen remembers from before.

She’s seen Helge Doppler, too, (although is relieved not to have encountered his scary mother, Greta, so far; Greta always scowled if she ever caught sight of Gretchen) and wondered if he remembers her, if he can still remember throwing that stick that had led to Gretchen travelling forward in time. He still smells the same, too, although he too has changed physically; he has injuries to his face which Gretchen doesn’t remember him ever having had before. If she could speak the same language as him, Gretchen would be asking him right now whether he had known when he threw that stick that it would lead to her ending up in 1986; he probably didn’t, since it was the scent of her owner, Claudia, that Gretchen had followed, rather than Helge himself (but again, the woman who had opened that door for Gretchen looked different, older still even than the Claudia who is living here now and who seems to have no idea what had happened.) She’s seen that other friend of Claudia’s, Tronte, too; since he had only just arrived in Winden in 1953 she hadn’t spent that much time with him, but enough to be able to tell that this older man is the same boy who had just moved in with them.

Sometimes Gretchen wishes she had just turned around and gone back the way she had come, just dropped the stick at Helge’s feet and then waited for Claudia and Tronte to come back; at least that way she would be living the life she knew. And people would know her, too; since she isn’t able to communicate to the Tiedemanns that she’s still the same Gretchen who belonged to the family in 1953, they’re talking as though she’s a different dog altogether, calling her Gretchen because she looks just like the dog they used to know. If she could at least explain, maybe someone could help her get back to the Tiedemann family and home that she was familiar with; instead she’s left trying to navigate this new time, this family that are her own and yet not the family she knew.