“What were you thinking?” people ask, disbelief warring with pity warring with the pre-mourning you’re getting used to.
Truth is, you weren’t thinking. You were just needing, desperately, and then the puppy happened. So, yeah. Not your best moment.
You’d been through the yearly trainings—of course you had, they mandatory for everyone under 18–and they’d all taught how to avoid exactly this. How to avoid needing so desperately that reality warped around you. How to avoid spending lifeblood-luck on the priorities of a young child. How to survive till adulthood.
But the puppy had looked at you, tail flailing so wildly that it might fall off, and eyes ocean-deep in the puddles of its irises, and, well, that was that.
For that Christmas, your parents got the impending death of their oldest child, and a puppy.
You want to resent the puppy. Want to hate it for using up your luck, and your life.
But the part of you that whispers worth it isn’t going anywhere, and if you’re going to die anyways, you might as well enjoy the last bits of it.
(In hindsight, you were looking for any rationalization for loving the puppy. In hindsight, you already did love the puppy. In hindsight, you always had loved the puppy, and it was more than foolish eight-year-old wishes that pulled you toward her.)
So you play. You call her Lucky, because, well, she is. You’d used practically none of your luck before this, praised for your self-restraint, and it’d all come bursting out with your need to play with her.
So basically, she’s your luck.
She’s the most adorable dog you’ve ever seen. And you check, too, subtly watching other dogs to see if you made the wrong decision, gave your heart too soon, settled for something too small, but nope. You wouldn’t trade her for the world.
“Good thing,” says your mother, then looks startled, like she hadn’t meant to say that, like she was trying to be grieving and sympathetic and accidentally got her normal humor, instead.
You like it, though. Anything normal is breathtakingly stabilizing, and she’s right, anyways. So you go play with Lucky, and try not to wonder how you’ll die.
Car crash? You can’t exactly avoid crossing the street unless you go into one of those low-luck programs that didn’t let you do anything interesting, and those don’t work, anyways. You think about car crashes a lot, because Lucky really likes watching cars, and will pester you endlessly until you let her plop down on the driveway and spectate. She‘ll sit there for hours, occasionally barking, but mostly curled into your side.
Will you choke on some particularly nasty food? You consider the meatloaf with deep skepticism, but everyone’s mood is too fragile for jokes, so you just slip the grossest bits to Lucky, who eats it all with gusto.
Will you just fall over and die? There was no way to answer that one, aside from how it hasn’t happened yet. You can tell your father thinks it, often, from the looks he shoots you, but you’re usually too busy playing with Lucky to dwell on it too long.
Accidental injury? Fatal illness? Something-or-other about the wrong place at the wrong time?
Nope to all of them. And it’s about then that everyone realizes that next Christmas is coming up, already. You gave up on worrying a few months in, too delighted with Lucky’s antics to rehash the same worn worries for the fifty-ish time, and now, reluctantly, people start doing the same.
It becomes an in-joke, eventually, that you’ve got the sort of luck to survive even without luck. You don’t tell people the punchline, since you’re thirteen, now, and you know that the answer would make people worry again.
The punchline is that Lucky’s a smart dog. And a weird dog. And a very, very lucky dog. You think you were probably onto something when you thought she was the embodiment of your luck.
Lucky likes running around in the rain, dodging as you try—and fail—to grab her leash. Lucky likes diving in rain-puddles that are much deeper than they look, warning everyone around that trying to drive across it might not be safe.
Lucky likes shaking the entire puddle out of her fur, too, as soon as you’re close enough to get drenched.
Lucky still likes watching cars. She doesn’t bark often, but you learn to be ready when she does, and that readiness means you stop three bad accidents and who-knows-how-many mishaps. One of them could have taken out the family car, so Lucky gets unprecedented permission to frolic on the couches for the rest of the day.
Sometimes Lucky will bark at random moments, and paying attention to it means that you avoid rather a lot of awkward or embarrassing situations. And then Lucky will bark in your face, all slobber and joy, and you have to learn to distinguish between warning-barks and you-are-the-light-of-my-life barks, because the latter is enthusiastically frequent.
Lucky likes stealing food. Honestly, that one’s probably normal dog behavior, but there’s the time she stole the cookie dough that’d sat out too long and gave your little sister a bad case of food poisoning, so now you’re not quite sure. Lucky either has a stomach of steel, or she just likes treats. Either way, you let her get away with it.
By the time you’re seventeen, you’ve got basically used to the idea that your luck is a very slobbery, cuddly, affectionate dog.
But then Lucky drags you to an abandoned building one evening, even though you’ve never been and never would have gone, otherwise, and there’s gunfire and shouting and screams. I should probably panic, you remember thinking, but you don’t. You know what to do—you watch Lucky. And she’s off, dragging herself nearly out of her collar, every line of her body determined and impatient. You follow her into the worst of the gunfire, and end up finding the control box that kills the lights. People stop shooting when it goes dark, no longer able to tell enemies from allies, and then the police are shoving in and arresting everyone in sight.
That incident ends with seven criminals arrested, three hostages rescued, and not a scratch on you. The paramedics call it a miracle.
It’s been coming for a while, now, but this is where you’re forced to admit that you haven’t been leading anything like a “normal” life for a good long while. (Lucky licking you awake at midnight to go haul scrap metal off the train tracks, Lucky aggressively befriending your classmate until you go visit him after school, just in time to call an ambulance when his head cracks against the kitchen tiles and he won’t wake up, Lucky’s eyes glowing flashlight-white when the woods get too dark, and you don’t think dog eyes do that even though the glow spotlights the half-broken bridge those hikers would have crossed ten minutes later.)
The inside of the heroics office isn’t all that impressive. The bank vaults looked cooler, for sure.
The recruitment officer’s even less impressive, all weedy height and a posture that said he had lots of experience with paperwork, and no experience with life-or-death stuff. (You’ve been life-or-death stuff since you were eight.) “Noble, kid, but you spent your luck already. You’d be a liability.”
“Sir,” you say, grin just a little too sharp, “tell me how much luck it takes to survive a decade past my luck.”
His silence says he knows it’s impossible, that five people’s luck couldn’t extend life like that, but that he doesn’t want to try figuring out the weirdness that is your life.
Tough. You aren’t going to let him ignore you, and if all else fails, you know his superiors will be very interested in you.
Lucky’s not going to let you live anything like a quiet life; it’s about time you started using it for something more than random one-offs.
prguitarman
kianamaiart
tangentwithtanner
