Mr. Cupcake and the Rat: A Sense of Danger
Ren - Real World AU.
Ren - Real World AU.
Ren had a poorly developed sense of danger. It didn’t understand things like scale. Or equivalent exchange. For most people, for example, there was nothing under the sun that could get them to tolerate being around someone who was, frankly, one the scariest looking people to ever live. What that meant for Ren, however, was that she’d do it for a single tossed biscuit, because you could live with mortal terror but you could not live without food.
This was probably why she’d taken to coming around the bakery every day like a stray cat. All the homeless hit up bakeries and restaurants around closing time. It was an easy way to get free scraps before they hit the dumpster. But staking out a place like that was damn hard and involved a lot of physical strength that Ren lacked. She was barely over five feet tall. She had essentially never not been homeless, so she took 'malnourished’ to a lifelong extreme. She didn’t have a canine or feline ally, because the only creatures that seemed to like her were rats.
In homeless terms, she was the bottom of the barrel.
So when she’d stumbled across a bakery that others left alone, it didn’t matter that they did so because the owner was almost certainly a serial killer and/or serial rapist. Food was food.
She’d started off in the dumpster, not willing to risk making herself evident, because the other homeless avoiding him meant he was likely the kind to take violent exception to that sort of thing.
Then, one day, he’d caught her at it.
He’d dragged her out of his dumpster by her collar, and she’d felt her life flash before her eyes. He’d towered over her as she’d cowered on the pavement…
And he’d given her some day-old cupcakes.
There had been more, after that. Baked goods left out in the alley, normally because some sort of mistake had been made. She began to check back multiple times per day, because sometimes she could get things remarkably fresh. She made the ten or twenty blocks around his shop her new haunt. When she’d found the little window into the attic above his shop, left unlocked because no one could possibly climb up to it or fit inside or even find it–she was frightfully skinny and frightfully good at climbing and frightfully curious–it was a done deal. She was sleeping in his attic when it rained and eating his food and the shop was officially Hers.
He was leaving her lunches now. In little brown paper bags
She’d been drawing on the bags, with a sharpie she’d found somewhere. The drawings decorated her little corner of the attic.
He was still a very scary man, and she still suspected some kind of inevitable trick. To find out he was luring her closer to do something terrible to her. That was always the case; men had many uses for women who wouldn’t be missed. But Ren had a poorly developed sense of danger. And she could no longer live without cupcakes and bread that hadn’t risen right and sandwiches made with good meat and real vegetables.
If it killed her tomorrow, at least she would have gone out full and dry, surrounded by little drawings of rats and flowers and cupcakes on brown paper bags.
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