Unlikely Angel

This is a short work of erotic fiction containing furry, or anthropomorphic, characters, which are animals that either demonstrate human intelligence or walk on two legs, for the purposes of these tales. It is a thriving and growing fandom in which creators are prevalent in art and writing especially.

*****

Unlikely Angel

The buck grimaced as he sprawled on his bed, cloven hooves kicked over the edge of the rumpled sheets. The only clothing he wore was a pair of red boxer shorts, seeing no need for anything more as he was in perfect solitude with the campus being closed. When the time for students to buy duvet covers en masse had come, he had chosen a blue duvet cover for his first semester of college. He would have preferred green. The blue duvet cover had been heavily discounted, however, so he had had no choice in the matter.

He scowled at the scholarship paperwork on the desk; it was piled neatly enough, its presence a sore spot. It should have been a source of pride that a buck from Cody's background had been able to scrape together enough scholarships to study Advanced Physics; it was a high honour and one of the proudest days of his life to receive the acceptance letter. In sleepless New York, Binghamton accepted him as a student where winter snows sent chills through his coat of short, brown fur. Cody grumbled. He did not grow a thick enough winter coat to ward off the cold, especially when the heating in his dorm room was turned down to zero.

A second single bed resided a couple of metres away, allowing the individual roommates some sleeping privacy, with the sheets made up pristinely. He snorted and shook his head, being of an untidier breed to his roommate. He had little to actually make a mess of when it came right down to it, but there were countless arguments. The bay Shire horse groomed his surroundings until they gleamed but forgot to maintain his own appearance, leaving his mane a mess and feather in a scraggly rope. At least he did not forget to shower.

The buck muttered under his breath as he kicked himself to his hooves, rocking his body upright in a lithe spring of motion. His fingertips danced along his forearm as he halted halfway across the room, leg outstretched as if the energy to complete the motion suddenly left his body. Paw falling, the buck frowned. What was he doing, getting up, anyway? What exactly did he think he was going to do? He couldn't do anything. He'd had enough walks around campus to last him a lifetime and, with everyone home on Christmas Eve, there was not even anyone to hold his interest.

Listlessly, he pawed at his chest of drawers, tucking a stray shirt back amongst its fellows. There was no point in doing anything else, nothing to do and nowhere to be. Cody sighed. There was no one to be nowhere with either. That would have been nice.

The fuck am I meant to do? Cody thought, scuffing a hoof over the carpet where he'd worn a line through the fibre. Every day's the same. Sure, study is great and all that jazz, I know I'm lucky, but where's the rest of it?

He huffed and shook his head.

Everyone gets to have fun...why not me? I got here, didn't I? Don't I deserve it too? Just a bit?

Cody's ears drooped to either side of his head.

A friend? Maybe?

Money was the currency of college and, while even the most strained of students could usually afford to sit in their dorm with filched drinks, Cody did not have that luxury. Dorm and student fees sapped so much that he was lucky if he had enough left to feed himself. And even then he pilfered from free buffets at the college and discount food from the supermarkets, wherever he could traipse at closing time to find the cheapest sustenance. Hell, once he'd even gone to a food drive where they dished out meals to the needy. That had been his only hot meal that week.

Frowning, the buck lifted a blue, simply designed shirt to his muzzle and took a sniff. His eyes widened and his arms shot away from his body, holding the shirt at arm's length as his muzzle contorted. It could not have been that long since he had done a load! The buck grumbled, crumpled the shirt into a ball and tossed it on the floor, quickly checking the stash of coins atop his chest of drawers. He had a few quarters left, just enough for what he needed.

Cody stuffed every piece of clothing into a holey plastic bag, filling it and then a second to the point where they threatened to burst. He may be alone on Christmas Eve but life went on. The buck fingered his antlers. He almost wished life wouldn't go on. But he couldn't think like that for too long, or else he'd never get out of it.

And the laundry wouldn't do itself.

*

Cody shivered and hunched his shoulders against the bite of wind. Not for the first time that winter, the buck wished desperately that he had a scarf to keep winter's cold fingers from his throat. Once, when he was younger, one of his foster families had given him a fantastic scarf in red and yellow stripes: the colours of Griffindol. A huge Parry Hotter fan, it had been the gift of the year and he'd worn it everywhere, even when the summer months encroached. Eventually though, he moved on from that foster family like he had all the others before and, somewhere along the way, the scarf had become lost forever. Not unlike him.

He shuddered and ducked as the wind picked up flurries of snow and he trod along the barely visible path bare-hoofed. There were no other tracks ahead and no lights glowing from dorms or campus buildings as cloud cover further darkened the night sky. It could not have been that late, perhaps seven or eight in the evening, but it could have been the dead of night for all the life the campus cradled.

Cody laughed, the sound harsh and echoing in the frozen air. Snow crunched beneath his hooves.

"'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house," he muttered, "not a creature was stirring...except one stupid buck."

Tightening his grip on the laundry bags, Cody kept his head down against falling snow and made his way slowly but steadily towards the Laundromat on campus. Most students scorned the little laundry room for its near broken down machines but Cody found it did the job all right, even if he had to give the dryer a kick every now and again.

Blowing into his paws, the buck squinted through the chill breeze and looked back at his hoof prints as he approached the utilities building. Part of another dorm, the rectangular black door for the Laundromat was difficult to spot in the gloom. The lights on the deserted campus had been switched off where paths would have been lit up, leaving him to find his way purely by his senses and the number of times he had walked the path before.

At last, he padded up to the door and pushed experimentally on the right side, expecting it to swing open at his touch - it had never been locked in his experience. When it did not immediately swing open at his hoofed fingertips, the buck tilted his antlers speculatively. Trying the handle gave no different result and Cody stared at it, lips parted in comic shock. The carrier bags weighed heavily in his paws, plastic cutting lines of pain into his palms.

"Closed?" He blinked at the door, raising his voice until it cracked in his throat. "Closed? You've got to be kidding me."

Anger flared, racing through his veins like wildfire. It wasn't fair! All he wanted to do was his damn laundry! Was that too much to ask? It was just laundry! Laundry!

Cody stomped childishly and flung the bags at the door; they struck the generous target and exploded in a shower of dirty clothes.

"No one even mans this!" He shouted at the closed door. "They could have left it open for us! Whoever was left on campus! But nooooo, of course not, that would be too fricking easy!"

Unwelcome tears pricked at the corners of his eyes and he swept them away with his knuckles, pressing into the sockets until lights flashed across his vision. It was ridiculous to be tearful over a locked laundry room but, in the moment, it felt as if the world was crashing down around his ears. Only one thing needed to go right, just one. That wasn't too much to ask. Or was it?

He stared at the carrier bags, clothes dampening as flakes of snow melted on their surface, slightly warmer than air outside. He heaved a sigh that held the weight of his young years behind it and gathered up the strewn fabrics, shoving them back into the bags with a rough, quick paw. When able, he would try the Laundromat outside campus, if he could afford it. Shivering, the buck turned homeward, thinking of the marginal warmth it held in retrospect now that he had ventured into the great cold. Yet there was no sense in wasting a walk and there was always one place around that was open, if but for a time.

The buck trudged through the snow with his paws dug into his pockets, arms through the handles of the bags so that they hung at the inside crease of his elbow. Cody thought of his parents, mind wandering, drifting. The deer held no memories of them, bar ones he had concocted for himself - a light, musical laugh that soothed him to rest as a fawn and a warm, steady paw guiding him. Those were good thoughts when they came, but his heart twisted and he clamped down on emotion, locking it down where he didn't have to acknowledge its existence. Though they were long gone, he knew his parents wouldn't have wanted him to be cold. Cody gritted his teeth. He just had to keep his head high and all would come right in the end.

He had to believe that.

Approaching the student union, he was unsurprised to find it in darkness, as there would be no business for the college while most of its clientele was away celebrating. He snorted, wishing it was open, though wishing had never gotten him anywhere. The modern exterior of the union was silent and forlorn, a far cry from the bustling noise and clamour of the food courts and public rooms that he was used to. He rarely used the facilities - like everything else, they cost money - but worked as a cover receptionist from time to time. He wasn't bad at the little gig either, if he was less than modest for a change.

Cody paused, ears twitching. In the alley to the far side of the union, something moved. He stopped in his tracks and peered down the alley, looking past an askew wheelie bin to where darkness flickered. The movement was there, even if barely discernible and so faint that Cody could have mistaken it for his imagination.

"Hello?" Cody called out hesitantly.

There was no response, yet the movement came again, a living being shifting in the half-light reflecting off the snow. The deer hesitated, shifting his weight anxiously from hoof to hoof. Ice seeped into his bones.

"Hello?" Cody coughed into his fist, narrowing his eyes as he peered down the alley, bins half-obstructing his vision. "Is anyone there?"

He paused. It was cold.

"Are you okay?"

He wanted to move on but he couldn't live with himself if he left some fur in the cold, hiding down an alley from who knew what. Though his fingers were frozen in his pockets, Cody crunched down the alleyway, back straight and ears turning to catch every sound. A sinuous black shape leaned back against the wall, formidable blocky jaws parted to show a flash of white teeth - a feline yawn. Cody sighed in relief, as there seemed to be nothing wrong with the strange fur, bundled up in warm clothes as he was in the middle of a deserted campus. It was weird that he was down an alley, but that was about the extent of the oddity to his eye.

Edging closing, the buck extended his paw, a few metres from the revealed Black Panther, trying not to shy away from the flash of red inside his muzzle, as his golden eyes gleamed.

"Are you okay?" He asked and then instantly wished he hadn't ventured down the alleyway at all.

The panther was not alone. Moaning, he arched away from the wall, thrusting his hips out sensually. Stripes glared in the shadows and the otter rested his paw on the top of another fur's head, level with his crotch. Cody's eyes widened.

A zebra knelt on the frozen ground, knees spread apart for balance. His stripes clashed starkly in the grey of the alleyway but his heavy, thick coat did nothing to hide the cock straining his lips wide. Bobbing his muzzle slowly, the zebra paid no attention to the slack-jawed buck, paws splayed flat against his partner's thighs. The panther locked his gaze with Cody's, smirking as his hips moved faster and faster, dragging the ungulate down on his cock so that the pink shaft was enveloped by long, zebra muzzle.

He should have left right then and there, yet Cody was transfixed. His gaze wandered to the cock plunging between the zebra's lips as the feline shuddered and thrust roughly, whole body jerking as he reached a quick climax. The zebra's throat worked as he swallowed, cum disappearing straight down his gullet as the panther groaned deep in his throat, a thick, guttural sound of male pleasure. Pinching the zebra's ear, he held him in close, muzzle grinding into his mussed up crotch fur until he was good and satisfied.

Cody gulped, standing stock still ass the scene played out before him. It was far too late to run.

The zebra let the softening cock slip from of his lips with a wet pop, cum drawing out in a string between the shaft and his startlingly pink tongue. Sitting back on his hooves, he raised an eyebrow and crooked his fingers in a 'come hither' motion towards Cody.

"Hey stud," he nickered, lip curling back from his teeth to taste the air. "Are you next?"

Heat flooded the buck's cheeks and he turned on his heel so that he did not have to look at the zebra's stupid smirk any more. Laughter chased his heels as he trotted from the alley, bags swinging noisily against his sides. What a fool he had been to assume that some fur had needed help! The buck cursed himself inwardly and smashed his hoof through a snow drift, sending chunks of ice flying where it had frozen in deeper.

Cody struggled with himself, waging a mental war against an invisible foe that hurled insult after insult at his cowering form. Why did they have to laugh at him like that? He had thought someone was hurt, for heaven's sake! He had tried to do a good thing and he had let himself down once again. It was always the same. The buck gnawed the inside of his cheek and drew his laundry bags in close to his chest, ignoring the crinkles as he hugged himself for comfort and warmth.

You are useless.

The buck closed his eyes.

No, I am not.

They'll be laughing at you for days. You'll be the butt of all their jokes.

I did nothing wrong.

Oh, but you did.

How?

By existing.

That makes no sense...

It makes sense to me.

No!

He shook snow from his antlers and charged off the path to mounds of snow, layered beautifully over grass. Trees dotted the mounds, strategically landscaped, and the buck darted between them, hooves flying as he fled his demons. Cold air raked his lungs with icy claws and his eyes bulged. Somewhere along his wild dash, he slipped, snow balling up beneath his hoof, and tumbled head first into a snow drift, a puff of powder erupting in his fall.

He coughed and blinked, floundering as he it threatened to swallow him. Panic rose in his throat and Cody half-yelped, a strangled noise that did not carry in the world of white around him. He kicked out and crawled from the drift, snow clumping in the fur on the back of his neck as if he had suddenly grown a stark white mane like a horse. Shocked from his flight, the buck shook his head and stumbled to his hooves, calves trembling and trousers dampened with now melting snow. Cody spun in a slow circle, calming his breathing as he took in the desolate campus, snow dropping from deciduous tree branches whenever a branch took too much of a burden. He could relate.

Maybe he needed to drop some of his burden too.

Sighing heavily, he looked down at the ground and searched the mess of prints and dirt-scarred white for something he did not know how to describe. Not quite hope but a reason to keep going. With a voice in his head and mockery behind, there were fewer and fewer reasons to not walk away forever.

"Having fun there, are you?"

Cody's head snapped up and his lips twisted into a scowl. The zebra from the alleyway leaned against a tree, arms crossed across his broad chest. His black and white mane rose from the back of his head and neck in a traditional zebra Mohawk, lips curving in a lopsided smile. The buck shook his head and straightened, searching for his carrier bags amongst the white - must have dropped them, how silly. And the zebra had clearly followed him...

Cody's heart chilled. Had the equine seen him fall like an idiot? Losing his balance like a fawn? He raised his chin defiantly, stifling the urge to swallow. Let him mock, if he dared. Cody's paw curled into a fist.

On the other hoof, it was not him that had been caught sucking off another fur in an alley. The snide joke in his head made him smile and he jerked his head to the side, a cockier glint entering his eye, if but for a fraction of a second. He'd show him.

"Yeah, I was actually," he retorted sharply. "What's it to you?"

"Nothing at all," the zebra answered. "Though it is strange indeed to find another student here so far from Christmas cheer."

Cody barked a laugh, breath frosting and the sound echoing mirthlessly.

"There's not much of Christmas when you're like me."

Cody sighed and rolled his shoulders in a shrug as the zebra studied him.

"That's very negative."

"Welcome to my world."

Cody growled, throat rumbling - an unusual noise for an anthro deer to make. What was the zebra's problem, sneaking up on him? What was his deal, anyway? What if the zebra was after more 'fun' like what he had been having with the panther in the alley, another cock to suck? The buck's eyes narrowed and he snatched up one carrier bag, reaching for the second as he searched for words, anything to get him and his stupid stripes to pack up and leave.

"Shouldn't you be with your buddy?"

Cody did not mean to sound so venomous but he kept his gaze stern. He'd be damned if he would let the zebra take advantage of him. The buck was better than that. He wasn't like him. Had never even done anything, come to think of it. Cody shook himself: it wasn't time to think of that.

Snorting, the zebra shook his head, brushing a bare paw through his short mane. Cody watched his blue eyes as they slipped away from his, shocking in their clarity and most unnatural for a zebra. Holding his paws up to either side as if to make a 'what can you do?' motion, the zebra dropped a conspirator's wink to the buck.

"Never seen him before, never gonna see him again." The zebra grinned. "Such is life and such are my travels. Name's Nick. What do they call you?"

"Ass, mostly."

Cody didn't think before speaking and cringed, grabbing the second bag from the ground to loop over an arm. The plastic crinkled obnoxiously as Nick gave a great, big belly laugh that rumbled up from his gut.

"Whereas I am confident your arse is a charming feature, I daresay it's getting quite cold now," Nick countered, a genuine smile brightening his muzzle. "Freezing my bloody tail off here. You want to go somewhere?"

Cody took a step back, ears pricked warily.

"I'm not up for anything like what you were doing...back there," Cody trailed off, unable to force out the exact words he wanted to say. "Trust me, dude, just because I'm hanging around campus on Christmas Eve doesn't mean I'm desperate. Or that I swing that way," he hastened to add. "Only trying to get by. As you do."

The zebra waved a paw dismissively, turning his muzzle away with what Cody could have sworn was a blush.

"No..." He grumbled. "No one was meant to see that. I didn't think anyone would be wandering around at this time."