Dog Ate my Homework? (Lenna/Feral)

It was not a good day.

Oh, it had started out well enough, if not delightful.  The sun was out but it wasn’t too hot, and while it looked like it might rain again later, she expected to be indoors, perhaps sprawled in the sun in a pile of fur since her assignment was done, and trying to finish it had been the hardest thing she’d done all month; she’d had to actually ask for an extra day to finish it all.

She’d left her dorm alone, the pack more interested in that patch of sun, and dodged puddles on the way to the main school building.  The assignment was rolled up in one hand, nice and neat to protect it as she went to hand it in, but when a much larger student went out of his way to shoulder past her - despite her sideways dodge - it fluttered open, pages gradually settling into puddles and stretches of mud alongside the path.

Feral herself managed to land her spin in a crouch, both hands deep in muddy grass, tail bristling and bones aching, but her annoyance faded into horror when the other student, and one of the two others with him, stopped, turned, and ground his muddy shoe into the nearest of the pages of her assignment.  One of his friends jumped onto another patch, and when Feral started to so much as lean towards them, to try to save her papers, the third loomed overhead.

All she really knew about the trio was that they weren’t hero course, and they were older than her by at least a year, and they didn’t think she should be there.  That she couldn’t be a hero.  And that if the school couldn’t see that, then they would take it upon themselves to reveal it.  She couldn’t do anything back to them; attacking them would be even more likely to get her expelled, and she wasn’t so confident in her physical strength against this particular group, non-hero-stream or not, when she was alone.  And whenever she tried to talk to them, they just laughed and made more fun of her and tried to taunt her into attacking, since she apparently talked like an animal and animals dealt with things with their teeth.

She ground those teeth together now, unable to speak, unable to save her papers while they stood on them, unable to just leave and have nothing at all to hand in, unable to do anything to the people responsible, while they laughed and stomped and loomed, and then the main student leaned down to pick up the papers.  Confused but still unmoving, crouched in the mud like an animal, Feral watched as he gathered up all the sheets, stacking them mostly neatly but probably not in order, and then moved toward Feral.  Her tail stiffened even more as he approached, but she slowly stood, mud dripping from her hands.

He stopped just outside of arm’s reach, and then ripped the wet, muddy paper apart.  He tossed the shreds into the air, and then finally left, still laughing.  A few feet away, he paused, and looked back.  “Just say your dog ate your homework,” he suggested, and then left with his friends.  Left Feral to crouch again and collect the fragments, try to clean off the mud with her muddy hands, and trudge back onto the path toward her original destination.  She was still trying to decide what she would do next when she found herself inside, tracking mud across the just-cleaned floors, and then at the entrance to the teacher’s lounge, and then her teacher was directly in front of her and she still couldn’t speak, just stand there with muddy hands and bare feet (although the latter wasn’t new), holding the piled, sticky mess of paper scraps and mud smears.