Sleeping Willow

________

You will be remembered as a hero. ________

Now, somehow, their entire mental health is based on the continued life and happiness of this fairground goldfish that they picked up.

Neither of you know the first thing about how to care for even a healthy fish. This fish has been poorly cared for, has multiple diseases and the person who handed it over explicitly didn't expect it to live nearly as long as it already has.

You're frantically googling how to set up a fish tank, where to buy fish food, can you even take a fish to the vet? Your partner wants you to know that they're happy they made it home and survived their horrific ordeal, but also that if anything happens to the fish then they're going to kill everyone on this planet and then themself.

You're honestly wondering if you're even helping the fish, or just prolonging its suffering, but your partner will only accept medical help for their many injuries or engage in basic self-care once they're confident that the fish is being looked after.

So you get a tank. You set up a filter and all that stuff. You learn way more than you ever wanted to know about water temperature and ph and nitrate levels. The fish is safe. You start to develop some affection for the little guy. Your partner begins to recover. The fish begins to recover.

Which is when you learn that in its 'healthy' state, the fish regularly refuses to sleep when tired, keeps begging for food that is obviously unhealthy for it (and struggling to eat the food that you do provide because “it tastes gross”), and continually tries to persuade your partner to take it out of its nice safe tank so it can go explore the wonderful world of Outside, where the slightest mishap will kill it instantly.

They liked being secluded, the discouraged him from going out and making friends, and never truly unpacked after they moved. like they should have been ready to leave everything in an instant. the only premiant thing in their lives that they chose was Dennis himself, they also had a lot of dogs.

he was very close to them. not that he had any other option, they were the only people he really spoke to. sure, he interacted with his classmates and teachers when he needed to but he didn't really make friends, his parents didn't let him go out at all, and who would stay friend's with someone they couldn't see or speak to at all outside of school at all?

as he got older, he realized just how much they were isolating him. He didn't know why. until he had a school assignment, it was simple, just look up your own and your families' names and see what you can find. it was meant to make the teenagers think about what they posted on social media, he wasn't even allowed to have social media.

he expected to see other people with him name. maybe his adoption records. rather, when he looked himself up, he found a missing person's report.

then, he looked up his dads. What he found was and FBI report about them, Aswell as a few news articles. When he got home that afternoon, he couldn't bring himself to eat. the only thing he could think was that he needed to get away. He started distancing himself from them.

obviously, his dads were concerned. up until then he'd told them everything and anything, but now he wasn't talking to them really at all. he didn't know how they might have thought when he moved out a few months later

And obvioulsy my first thought was It's Rocky and Adrian!

So I got to work. First I made a Rocky charm for the big project I was cooking up:

(It is an interpretation, okay? I know you have to be very imaginative to get it. I wanted to mix both the book and the movie designs into one but I had the resources I had and this is what came out, but I love him anyway)

But then I indulged myself and made tiny rocky and tiny adrian to put on my shelf and guys... They are just so freaking cute!

It makes me feel like this

some people don’t deserve fanfics, much less for free.

also even if authors didn’t tag any specific warnings but they used the “creator chose not to use archive warnings” tag, then that is your warning.