When I got my first job, my life was going something like this: I was lacking in parents, a home, and money. I didn't really consider food or shelter a problem (it was just early enough in the famine years that scrounging for food wasn't too difficult or dangerous, and Wonderland was warm as a general rule, and full of niches that a skinny teenager could fold himself into for the night and be relatively safe) but that did nothing for the holes in the bottoms of my shoes and the fact that my shirts and pants were getting a little short around the cuffs.

So, I became a milk boy. Yeah, I know…

There used to be a fair number of dairy farms not too far outside the city limits, you see. As the city got larger, and the road system collapsed, and many of the owners were forcibly relocated, what that amounted to was a bunch of rundown buildings and overgrown fields full of feral cows, completely separated from the people who wanted things like cheese and milk and butter.

Don't laugh. I am dead serious, those things are scary. Have you ever seen how big a cow is? Now imagine that it's angry, and trying it's best to pound you into the ground while bellowing for its even larger and scarier boyfriend to turn you into bone meal.

Ideally, you had to sneak out of the city with your bucket at night, and then, while it was dark, try and find a cow that a) was actually a cow, and not a steer and b) actually had some milk in it. Then, once you had something approaching a full bucket, you snuck back into the city, and handed over your supply in exchange for a bit of quid. Ideally. More often than not, it involved running for the nearest tree, sod the pail. Those cows are not half as unaware and stupid as they look, and they were vicious, vicious creatures.

Anyway, that job didn't last long. On top of the fact that it was exhausting work with very little gain and more than a bit of danger, there was a riot just a few months after I started. Sneaking outside in general was dangerous, and sneaking out of the city itself was pretty much suicide. By the time the Suits had come in and restored order- by which I mean, shot enough people that everyone else stepped back into place- I'd already decided that it wasn't worth it to keep working there. I wasn't sure what, exactly, I would do, but I knew for a fact that it would not involve cows of any sort.

Which is how I ended up working for a man called Bull. That you can laugh at.

A/N: You guys. I don't even know how to deal with the number of hits and reviews and favorites and suchlike I am getting. Thank you all so much, I can't tell you how encouraged I am by the fact that people enjoy reading my work. Thank you.