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// 1000 words: Companionship by Kaipony 
// Story: Fallout Equestria: Alphabet soup 
// by Doomande 
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It was purring. The damn thing was sitting there in the half-frozen muck of the downtown Vanhoover wastes, and it was purring at me. 

“Mrraaackk.”

Portions of the cat were shriveled and twisted in a manner in which I was very familiar. Two milky eyes ringed with jaundice peered up at me questioningly over a trio of broken whiskers while its hairless whip of a tail stood proudly erect. Patches of mottled white, brown, and black fur, and calloused sores covered its gaunt skin that split in places as the animal took a careful step forward. 

I slipped my knife back into its sheath—who wouldn’t have drawn a weapon upon hearing something snuffling around in a heap of filth and garbage—and spat the taste of its foul wrapping out of my mouth. I remained still, waiting for the cat to run off, but I must have waited too long for the animal, this ghoulish creature with whom I felt a strange kinship, boldly approached me to sniff at my filthy, cracked hooves and decaying jacket. 

“Um...hey there, little guy,” I croaked. 

“Mrraow?” 

Deciding that I was not a threat, which I wasn’t, with only a knife and half-empty pistol to my name, it rubbed its cold, lumpy body against my leg and purred even louder. It was a sound I barely remembered, let alone expected to ever hear again. I felt my tense muscles relaxing while the ghoulish feline wound its way around my forelegs, rubbing its patchy, rotten fur against my own poor excuse for a hide. I slowly knelt down and the cat gave my nose a sniff and bumped its head against me.

“You’re awfully friendly.” 

The feline gave a tortured approximation of a chirp and sat down in front of me. It looked up at me with expectant eyes, and its tail idly flicked in the muck. Then it leaned back onto its hindquarters and pawed at the air. I chuckled dryly, noticing how the paunchy girth of the cat slid down and provided a hefty base upon which to balance. The lumpy roll of uneven fat was such that I assumed the cat would need to rock itself forward many times to gain the necessary momentum to come back down on all fours.

A memory bubbled up to the surface like a pocket of gas trying to escape the cloying grasp of a swamp. It was difficult to place, with an accompanying sensation like that of pulling a hoof free of sticky mud. I sifted through the feeling, searching for whatever it was that was trying to rise to the surface, but all that coalesced was a faint image.

From the corner of one eye, something gray and shriveled skittered across the rusted lid of a trash bin. Before I could turn, it launched itself at my face. I twitched, but a pudgy blur slammed into the streak of gray with a simultaneous yowl and screech. I lurched to one side and again yanked the knife from my coat. But there was nothing for me to sink the blade. 

Looking down, I felt my heart slow its irregular pounding upon seeing the ghoul-cat’s gnarled teeth clamped down on the quietly struggling body of an emaciated radrodent. The rodent’s oversized incisors gnashed and snapped, but its movements quickly slowed, eventually twitching one last time before it shivered and lay still beneath the growling bulk of the undead feline.

The cat stood and licked its lips. Then, it picked up the carcass in its mouth, marched over to me, tail and head held high, and deposited the rat at my hooves. Stepping back, the mighty hunter looked up at me expectantly.

“For me?” I asked.

“Mrraarckk.” The cat’s tail flicked and waved slowly. “Rakkaww.” 

“I guess you’re right.” I chuckled. “I’m not much of a hunter.” Not wanting to appear ungrateful, I put my knife away, scooped up the carcass, and tucked it into the emptiest of my bags, taking care not to squish into anything valuable. The cat purred again and rubbed itself against my legs; our two decimated hides rasping against one another’s.

“You want to come with me?” I asked, voicing a thought and hope that bubbled up in my mind. It had been a very long time since I had had anyone to talk to or just keep me company. “I had one once,” I continued. “A pet. A very long time ago. Her name was…I—I can’t remember.” As though sensing my difficulty, the cat leaned into my legs and Pawed at my hoof.

“I guess you’re hanging out with me now. What do you say to that, um….” Radiation had malformed almost every part of the cat’s body to the point I could not tell whether it had once been a male or female. A problem with which I was far too able to empathize.

“How about…Fluffers? Mr or Miss, your choice.”

The cat chirped. The noises that rasped up from its chest were more like the sound of somepony grinding gravel in their hooves, but I swear the damn thing tried to smile at me as it did so.

“Fluffers it is, then. Do you want to—oh!” Without prompting, the cat leaped up onto my back and made itself at home just behind my shoulders.

“I think you and I are going to get along just FINE!” Sharp needles of pain prickled along my back as the cat kneaded my roughspun jacket, its claws easily piercing the material and finding my hide. “Less claws there, buddy,” I said, though Fluffers, as expected of a cat, ignored my demand. “How about we head home and find you something better than a mutant rat to eat?”

The cat licked one of my malformed ears and settled in for the ride home. I did not fight the grin that spread across my face. Giving my new pet a quick nuzzle, we turned and marched through the frozen muck of Vanhoover together.