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How Not To Become Lunch: 61 - Stay Unnoticed
“Jack? …Jack, are you in there? Are you okay? Jack?!”
*snort* “Huh!? What!?” Jack awoke to those half-registered words and the sound of his bedroom door opening. He looked over, rubbing his eyes. “Mom?”
“Oh, sorry honey. You had me worried for a second.” She watched him with a mildly anxious smile as he sat up. Nothing out of the ordinary there, though he did wonder why she’d felt the urge to check on him.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“Well, it’s getting late, and I wasn’t sure if you were planning on getting up for school.” She spoke sympathetically and tentatively, unsure of his mental state. “You can take one more sick day, if you need it.”
“Oh!” He looked at his clock. “No- um- I think I’m alright for today. I should really go; I don’t want to start falling behind in my classes and give my teachers an excuse to ‘fail’ me.”
The mention of the idea brought a bit more nervousness back to Mrs. Eten’s face. She nodded in agreement. But then her expression shifted into a little smile.
“I’m glad you’re feeling better. I’ll have to remember to thank Fiona next time she comes over.”
“Thank her?”
“For cheering you up. I couldn’t do much of anything to help you yesterday, but she managed it somehow.”
Jack didn’t reply; he wasn’t sure how. Sure, Fiona’s heart had been in the right place, but if his mom knew exactly what Fi had done that day, or the previous week for that matter, she’d probably be a lot less thankful. She’d probably be more than a little unnerved to find out just how literally close her son had gotten to that werewolf’s heart. Not even addressing the fact he had next to no idea how she would react to finding out exactly how emotionally close they’d grown; the fact he’d actually confessed his love to a predator, even if that predator was-
*ding* *dong*
“Well, I’d better go get the door,” Mrs. Eten said. “You’d better hurry if you don’t want to be late.” She smiled at him and stepped back out, closing the door to leave him with his privacy.
Jack pulled his groggy mind from his thoughts, and pulled himself out of bed, forcing himself to move a bit faster than his still-half-sleeping body would have liked. It was no wonder he’d slept in, considering how little he’d slept last night… or most of last week. But falling into his familiar routine and shaking off a yawn, he did his best to pick up the pace. Within only a few seconds, though, his mother’s muffled call from downstairs interrupted him.
“Jack, Fiona’s here for you!” she yelled.
Fi’s here? He found himself smiling. That added a fair bit of motivation on two fronts. Firstly, he wanted to get down and see her. But secondly, if she was waiting on him, he didn’t want to make them both late.
He rushed through his morning routine as quick as he could and made it downstairs a few minutes later. He found Fiona sitting on his couch, and they smiled warmly as they greeted each other, even as Jack rushed past into the kitchen. With the werewolf waiting on him in the next room, he worked to wolf down some cereal, as she chatted idly with his mom. He overheard her mentioning how she’d decided to get up a touch early and swing by so she could walk him to school. A gesture both he and his mother appreciated.
Jack finished his meal quite quickly, though maybe not quite as fast as Fiona might finish one of hers, and grabbed his bag and his friend before heading toward the door.
“Bye Jack, hope you have a good day at school,” Mrs. Eten called on the way out.
“Thanks,” he replied with a little smile.
“Oh, and Fiona? Thank you so much for taking such good care of him.”
“Of course,” she replied, in what could easily pass for a casual reply. But Jack noticed the slight reservation in her tone, and the hitch in the slow, cheery sway of her tail as she heard those words. That wasn’t a compliment she could accept easily, but her discomfort showed only for a moment, until the door closed.
They set off for school, and the trip passed in almost no time. Not surprising, considering they were walking fast to make the bell, but time did always seem to slip by them rather swiftly when they got to chatting. They talked about their upcoming classes, their shared disbelief over the events of the previous day, and about their plans for after school. Fiona asked if Jack wanted to hang out at his place, but he instead offered to go to hers. He’d remembered to throw the clothes she’d lent him into his bag the night before, and going to her house after school gave him a chance to return them.
Before they knew it, they were walking up the school steps, still chatting away. And the familiar sight brought a new thought to Jack’s mind.
“We- or, um- I should probably find Ozzy,” he mentioned as their previous subject faded from conversation. “I was out all day yesterday; he probably thinks I got eaten.” Ironically, Jack had been eaten- or at the very least, swallowed whole- but his attention was less on the irony, and more on the idea of his friend dejectedly mourning the loss… a second loss.
“Yeah, you probably should…” Fiona agreed, but she couldn’t hide the reluctance in her voice, speaking the words with a notable softness, a shadow of guilt, suddenly much more withdrawn than just a moment ago. Jack picked up on it, of course; a pause entering the conversation.
“I don’t think there’s enough time before homeroom,” Jack said, whether out of sympathy or practicality. “I can find him later.”
“Yeah…”
They made their way down the halls, and the topic gradually changed, their back and forth slowly picking back up as they made their way into the classroom.
And soon after, the school bell rang, and the day had begun.
…
“Alright class, five minutes left,” Ms. Caster told- or more accurately teased- her students. Or even more accurately, teased Jack specifically, as she shot him a distinctly hungry look.
Luckily for Jack’s mental state, he didn’t see it. Unluckily, that was only because he was staring down at the paper on his desk, totally stressing out.
“Come on, Jack, think!” he muttered to himself. Normally he wouldn’t have dared make a sound in the middle of class, let alone during a test, but he was completely sure that Ms. Caster wouldn’t be able to hear him, not over that ear-piercing racket she dared call ‘music’.
Had the witch really felt the need to play that stuff throughout the whole pop quiz? ‘You need to learn to think fast in a world full of distractions.’ Ha, yeah right. More like ‘You need to fail this test so I’ll have an excuse to eat you for lunch’. Muttering was practically all he could do to help concentrate; he had to voice his thoughts aloud, because otherwise there was no way he'd be able to hear himself think!
“Maybe it’s- Ah, no…”
Unfortunately, all the muttering and ‘concentrating’ in the world couldn’t make up for the fact that Jack had no clue what most of these answers were. Turns out Ms. Caster had decided that Jack’s absence yesterday had marked the perfect occasion to start a brand-new lesson topic: potions. You’d think spending years with a magical aunt and her mountain of potion ingredients would have rubbed off on him, but apparently not. His aunt never had been the best teacher. And that meant without any of yesterday’s lesson, Jack was completely in the dark.
Figuratively, that is. He wouldn’t be literally in the dark until his witch of a teacher shoved him down her throat and wiped her lips with his F.
“Whoa!” *thud*
Jack glanced over, as did a number of other kids, to see a student a few rows away had managed to tip his chair and tumble onto the floor. It was a student Jack recognized, actually, but not in a good way. It was one of the few mage-preds in the class, one who he knew had a tendency to enjoy preying on other human classmates.
“Hey! You stay in your seat until class is over!” the witch teacher threatened.
“Yes! Sorry, Ms. Caster!” he yelled back over the blaring cacophony, scrambling to right his chair and get his butt back in it before she decided it belonged in her throat.
Jack looked back to his desk, realizing the distraction had cost him valuable moments of what remained of his pre-witch’s-lunch life. He started to return to his hopeless quiz, when he noticed a new piece of paper had somehow appeared next to his test. It was just a small square of parchment, rather inconspicuous, but it had something scribbled on it…
Were those… were those notes!? From yesterday’s class!?
“Three minutes,” Ms. Caster chimed, vaguely ‘singing’ the words along with the screeching ‘music’.
Jack wasted no more time. He went as quickly as he possibly could, hardly stopping to think. Even if the answers were dead wrong, they wouldn’t make him any more dead than a basically blank test. He scribbled furiously, forcing himself to ignore how legitimately interesting a few of the details were, in favor of saving time and saving his life. And by some miracle, he managed to finish just in time, just before Ms. Caster called out:
“Alright, time’s up!”
The ‘music’ abruptly stopped. The witch waved her wand and all the tests fluttered from her students’ desks toward her own, sorting themselves midair as they flew into a pile before her.
Jack chewed his lip.
Ms. Caster’s smile dropped into a frown. She snatched the papers up and looked through them herself with frustrated disbelief, but grumbled a moment later and threw the pile of quizzes back to her desk. She looked to Jack with a skeptical, maybe even accusatory glare. But then the lunch bell rang, and the witch sighed.
“Alright you lot, you all passed,” she waved her hand toward the classroom door.
Jack let out his breath.
Mrs. Caster waved her wand once more, filing the test papers away before heading for the door herself. The other kids, eager to get out, all stopped and made way. After all, if she wasn’t eating one of them now, it probably meant she’d be going out to hunt for some other poor soul to shove down her gullet, and none of them wanted to cross that path.
With the teacher gone, Jack took a moment to glance around the room. That paper must have come from somewhere. Who’d given it to him? His eyes caught on another kid a few rows back, who seemed like he was having a mild, if well-managed, panic attack. He was breathing fast and hard, making a visual attempt to calm himself as he rose from his seat. Jack might have moved on with his search, except that the other boy seemed to keep glancing at him, and after a moment started walking in his direction.
“That was… *pant* …that was terrifying,” the boy muttered to himself.
“Um, are you, okay?” Jack asked. Granted, the test had definitely been stressful, especially for him, but this kid looked a bit… worse for wear.
“Yeah, I think so, I just- *pant*- phew. When I passed you those notes, I was really worried Caster was gonna have me for lunch.”
“Oh, so that was you? Well thanks! You totally saved my butt!” Jack smiled warmly, and the kid seemed to attempt a smile back, but he was clearly still a bit shaken. “And, um, you don’t need to worry too much,” Jack added in an attempt to calm his nerves, “If she had noticed, she definitely would have eaten me, not you.” He wasn’t happy to acknowledge that, but he figured someone might as well take some comfort in that fact.
“I know,” the other boy replied. “And I was sure that Ms. Caster was completely distracted when I slipped you the notes. But even though I knew she wasn’t looking, and I knew she would have taken you instead of me, just knowing that I’d potentially made myself an option was so…” He took another deep breath and put a hand to his head, “I’m not used to taking that kind of risk.”
Clearly. This kid seemed terrified at even the idea of just catching a pred’s attention. Not that poor marked Jack couldn’t somewhat relate.
“Well, thanks again- um…” Jack offered the notes back to their owner, realizing that he had never gotten said owner’s name.
“Arin,” the other boy replied.
“Jack.”
“I know. I’ve seen you around class, and of course there was that thing you did in the cafeteria. That was really impressive by the way. I mean, it was crazy, but really impressive.”
“Oh, right, the cafeteria,” Jack echoed. He’d made a rather conspicuous scene the last time he’d been in there, when he’d stormed over to the pred side and blasted Pyre across the room. In retrospect it did seem kinda crazy to think he’d actually done that. And it was even stranger knowing he’d then gone on to shake the dragon boy’s hand- sort of.
“Wow, I still can’t believe I just did that. But the thought of that ‘gobbler’ Caster getting the Cafeteria Hero was just… Ugh! I know all she wants is to get you in her stomach, and of course she’d try something like this, pulling a quiz after you missed a day. We’re lucky that other kid fell over or I never would have had the opening. Honestly I kinda wish she’d had him for lunch; he’s a gobbler too, you know, one of those mages-turned-predator. I feel bad saying it, even thinking it really, cause I don’t want any humans to have to end up food, but better him than a decent person, right?”
“Um, right…” This Arin kid sure did talk a lot…
“Anyway, I gotta run. Safest to go to lunch while as many of the other kids are still on their way, better odds of making it there.” He lifted his wand and tilted the tip up toward himself. “Videre celare.” And Arin disappeared from view before Jack’s eyes, giving a disembodied “Goodbye,” before walking off.
Jack’s eyes somewhat instinctively followed the sound of receding footsteps as they faded toward the door. He stared through that door for a long moment, probably waiting, on some habitual level, to see the other kid leave, as a social signal that their interaction was over. After around thirty seconds, he was simply forced to assume the invisible boy was gone.
He kept looking through the door anyway, though. After all, he was waiting on someone to come in through it. Fiona had been walking him between classes all morning, keeping him safe and unconsumed. It meant he was usually one of the last kids to leave the room, which definitely had its benefits. He was a fair bit safer sitting inconspicuously at his desk than walking the halls; most preds tended to ignore classrooms, as nearly all the prey were in transit. Normally, as Arin had pointed out, it would come with the major downside of having to eventually hurry to class through mostly empty halls, but the safety which came from having other kids around to take your place in a hungry belly- or even a few friendly mages around to watch your back- was nothing compared to the active protection of a fierce werewolf like Fi.
And so he passed his time waiting, and watching, the bulk of his classmates gone, and the few stragglers gradually trickling out one by one on their way to lunch.
“Whaaaa!”
Jack’s eyes widened slightly as a classmate he’d just watched pass into the hall suddenly disappeared from view, pulled away by the unmistakable, furry arms of a sizable predator.
“No! Hey! Put me down!” The girl’s distressed cry reached him as she gradually came back into view. First were her kicking legs, held just off the ground, then a flash of her blonde hair as she presumably shook her head, and finally the rest of her, held upright by the same big, black-furred paws which had taken her, pinning her hands to her side.
The pred took a couple more lazy steps forward, revealing thick, black-furred arms and legs with patches of white, followed by a noticeable bit of paunch, wrapped within a tie-dye tee shirt, before their muzzle came into sight.
The panda girl came to a stop, by coincidence just perfectly in Jack’s view, framed by the open doorway, holding the human girl she’d captured. The pred stood slightly taller than her new prey, but was clearly much stronger, shifting to hold the entire kid in a single, beefy hand while the other limply drifted over to the mage’s wand, plucking it from her waist with a pair of claws and then just letting it drop to the floor.
“Please! Let me go! Don’t eat me!” the blonde pleaded, as the panda pred began lifting her higher- still single-handed- until her hips were up to the predator’s head. She looked down onto the black-and-white-furred face, her eyes crying for empathy, but the panda’s eyes were mostly concealed behind a pair of red-tinted glasses.
“Sorry. Kinda hungry,” came the bear’s reply. Definitely curt, but much more tired and lethargic than anything else.
The panda lifted her prey a touch higher, to her arm’s limit, tilted her muzzle upward toward her meal, and began to part her giant jaws.
*yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawn*
The jaws stretched incredibly wide; wet, slick muscles shifting, jowls pulling back, teeth bearing, the pink tongue flexing and stretching as the tired call flowed out along its length from the gaping, dark depths beyond.
And as the human girl was transfixed in horror by this bone-chilling sight, she felt what seemed like a furry manacle clasp around her ankle. She didn’t have to look away from the yawning maw to see what was happening, because the next moment she saw her own foot pushed inside it as the jaws began to drift closed, guided by a black-furred grip.
*glrk*
“No!”
The muzzle partially closed around her shin for a moment, and when it spread again, her ankle had sunken down into the grip of the bear’s throat, her calf squishing against the supple, pink tongue with insidious comfort.
She tried to pull it out, but as slick as the esophagus felt against her skin, it held her tight as a vise. That’s when she felt the paw grab her other leg, leading it leisurely toward the sea of pink to join the first.
“Ugh!”
*squelch*
Struggle as she might, the blonde simply did not have the strength to break free of her predator’s grip. A grip that would only be getting tighter and tighter.
*gulp*
Jack frowned as he watched the girl’s knees slip into the panda’s muzzle. He wished he could help, but…
The truth of the matter was, seeing other kids get eaten was just something you had to get used to. It probably got to Jack a bit more than most. Since he’d been secluded away for so long, he hadn’t really been exposed to the sight enough to adjust to it. Not to mention since coming to school he’d had way more than his fair share of close calls for such a short span of time. Still, living in a world of predators, he had certainly gotten accustomed to the idea, if not the sight.
Predators hunting humans was a way of life, the way of nature. It was something that had to be lived with. It was never easy, seeing another human being disappear into a shadowed gullet, never to be seen again, but the reality was it was simply too much to ask for a person to feel deep sorrow, pain, or anger, for every meal they ever saw a predator seal away.
Survival for a human meant picking one’s fights, choosing one’s chances, and knowing the risks. In action, and in emotion. You saved your grief for those close to you, or lost your emotions all together. And you saved your fight for the moments where it would count, or else you got eaten.
*GULP*
Jack watched the girl’s waist disappear into the throat of the hungry panda, feeling a familiar sympathy, but he knew there wasn’t anything he could do. Rushing in to help her, all alone, meant putting himself in the middle of a hallway full of hungry preds, to focus on the one pred in sight who couldn’t currently eat him. And even if he didn’t get snatched up by another hunter, and by some miracle managed to free that girl from the bear’s jaws? The bear was still there, still hungry. And who would she go after? The random girl she’d already gotten a taste of, or the marked boy who’d dared to interfere with her meal? And then it would be right back at the beginning again, roles reversed, with the savior in the gullet of a predator and the previous damsel, half-drenched in saliva, shocked by death’s touch, left with the question of whether to help, or run screaming for life.
There was a reason most humans didn’t rush in to help strangers. It was either they’d learned they couldn’t pull it off, or they had already tried, and they were already digested. Only the mages who really knew their stuff could pull off a rescue in a place like this. And Jack, well…
*GULP*
Jack had started school three weeks ago.
*GULP*
“No! Nonononono-”
The panda’s muzzle closed around the girl’s head, leaving her blonde hair trailing from the furry lips. The bulge in the bear’s neck, reaching all the way down to her pudgy gut, wriggled with the struggles of a fresh meal. And then came the final swallow.
*gulp*
The golden hair slipped into the predator’s maw like strands of spaghetti, following the rest of the hungry student’s prey as it descended the fuzzy throat and slipped wholly into the waiting belly below with a vigorous wiggle, met in turn only by a casual-
*URRP*
The panda girl smiled dully, undoubtably at the sensation of a nice, spirited human filling up her gut, and placed a hand on the bulge her meal made. And then she continued to walk, taking slow, lumbering steps, and taking the blonde girl along with her, to her digestive end.
Jack breathed.
A few moments later, another figure appeared in the doorway, stepping through it into the room where Jack sat. She shared a number of features with the panda he’d just seen devour his classmate: a coat of fur, a set of claws, a tail- though of quite a different sort.
But seeing this, Jack smiled.
“Hey Jack,” Fiona said with a little wave. Her tail wagged a touch as she set eyes on him.
“Hey,” he said back, finally rising from his desk.
“When I saw that panda walking away, I was worried it might have been you in there,” she confessed.
“Not this time,” Jack replied, his smile broadened, because he carried in those words the message that it was thanks to her that he was still safe.
Fiona’s tail wagged again, and she smiled as well. Because knowing that he was safe, and that she was helping to keep him that way, gave her a joy that no belly full of blonde could match.
“So, hungry?” she asked him.
“I guess I could eat. You?”
“You know, kinda always.”