the world needs a little more Lucas...(: He's a fun character an I decided to mess with him a little so I wrote some drabbley drabble and it started one wary and then kinda went another so I hope you like it an its acceptable and such(:

also, it's told by a rat. Because why not have an anthropomorphic canonish OC rodent in the mix?

"Hey little fella!"

I immediately perked up at the sound of my human's voice. Shaking the sawdust from my gray-brown fur, I rose and scurried over to where he was kneeling, his face level with my own much smaller one.

"How's the ol' tummy feeling?"

My human put his finger in between the bars of my cage and tried to pet me on the head. I retaliated with a jocular, playful nip to his finger. He quickly pulled it back out and held his hand in the other.

"That was not nice, little fella." He reprimanded. The human brought his finger closer to his face, his gray-blue eyes carefully studying the tip for any bite marks. I'd been careful to only push on his skin, not break it, so he wouldn't find anything.

He rubbed the finger, muttering to himself.

"I'm gonna get rabies and I'm gonna contaminate all the bodies and then the whole department's gonna get rabies and I'm gonna get fired and by then the whole city will have rabies..."

For some reason, a smile began to cross his face. I twitched my nose in confusion.

"New York City is gonna have a rabies epidemic because of us!"

He opened the cage and picked me up in his palm, in the same hand he'd just been panicking over being bitten.

"Just imagine it, little fella! All those snazzy businessmen roaming the streets like zombies, foaming at the mouth, instilling fear in every citizen, every tourist, every person! It'll be better than any story, any legend, any graphic novel-it'll be real life! And it'll all be thanks to you and me, fella. We're starting an epidemic!"

My human was now looking to the sky, his right fist held victoriously in the air. I remained in his left palm, pacing in a circle. Not a normal circle, but shifting my body left and right, turning myself 360 degrees without going anywhere. His hand, though large by human standards, was still too small for a rat like myself to walk circles around. He looked back down at me and I looked back up, still twitching my pink nose in my frustration of trying to move around.

"All right, you can go back home," he sighed. My human carefully put me back in the cage and I scurried around joyfully. He poured some food into the dish on the side of the metal box next to my water bottle. I sniffed the air to confirm what I'd seen, then went over and took a bite.

My human was back at eye level with me, watching me gobble down the food. It was a bit intrusive, but I'd gotten used to it over the past few weeks. He had, after all, saved my life after I'd eaten a dead human and gotten really sick, so a little annoyance here or there didn't bother me all that much.

"Do you have a name, little fella?"

I paused and looked up at him. What is a name?

"You need a name."

I still don't know what a name is, but I'll take it. Especially if its food. I like food.

"Hmm..." he mused. "Squeakers? No, too cliche. Fighter? Don't name him after the case, Lucas..."

My human went on speaking this nonsense for some time before he cried out with alacrity what would become my name.

"Oscar! What about Oscar? You look like an Oscar, don't you think, little fella?"

I had no prior experience with this Oscar, but I could tell it wasn't going to be food. I went back over to my human's hand anyway, hoping for a treat.

"Aww, you like it! Good boy, Oscar!"

He handed me a slice of rotting cheese, which I devoured voraciously. He rose and was about to go out the door of the apartment when he turned back around and looked at me.

"Wanna go to work with me today, Oscar?"

{•*•*•*•}

"Would you mind telling me why there is a caged rat on the autopsy table?"

The other human, the one with dark, curly head-fur and a funny accent, looked at my human from the corner of his eye, then immediately returned his eyes to me and my cage.

"Oh, that's just Oscar." My human shrugged as he continued investigating the body on the table next to me.

"Lucas." The dark-headfurred human began in a parental sort of way. "Why is there a rat named Oscar on the autopsy table?"

Oh. Lucas must be my human's name.

Lucas set down his shiny body-probing tool and looked up at the other man.

"He's my friend, Doc. Remember the Raul Lopez case? He was the little fella who ate Raul's ring. I felt so bad for him during the surgery and he was just so darn cute sleeping off the anesthesia I thought maybe I could keep him?"

Lucas raised and lowered his shoulders with a shy smile. The Doc glared back at him, not in anger but almost in a resolved way, as if this was annoying him as much as Lucas' cutesy talk did to me every morning.

"And you thought keeping a wild rat from the streets of New York as a pet would be a good idea why? Better yet, you thought that it could just ride along and watch you at work?"

"C'mon, Doc. He's been here before. And he's in a cage, he's not going to contaminate anything."

"Just to be safe," the Doc picked up my cage by the top handle, "it's going in my office for the rest of the day. And then it's going home with you, Lucas. And staying there."

"A wild rat is not to be kept as a pet. Remember all the disease they carry, lassa fever, hantavirus, salmonella, the Black Death?"

I took offense to that. I am a healthy rat, a clean rat, a quality companion no matter what the circumstances.

"But Henry," Lucas whined.

"You are a grown man, Lucas."

"Exactly! I'm a man who needs a companion, someone to talk to every once in a while! You're not too into that and I know you don't care but I don't live with anyone and I don't have a girlfriend and you get to talk to Jo all day at work and I'm just here all alone looking at dead people."

"Detective Martinez is our coworker. It's inevitable that a homicide detective would need to meet with a medical examiner quite often..."

A little smile crossed my human Lucas's face. I saw because he turned away from the Doc Henry and was now facing me, sitting in my cage on the desk in his office.

"I think she just comes to talk to you."

Henry raised an eyebrow. "Well, of course she needs to talk to me, get the details of her case and all that..."

"Not talk. Talk."

My human raised his brow to intimate his true meaning, but Henry still seemed lost. At the same time, a female human came in and, brushing my Lucas aside, went straight to Henry.

"And that is my cue to leave," Lucas said, mainly to himself. He walked in the office and took my cage from Doc Henry's desk.

"C'mon Oscar. Let's let the lovebirds be."

Lucas walked out of the dead-body room without a moments heaitation. From in my cage, I watched Henry and the woman look back at us, a little confused, then at each other, then back at us. The woman raised her brow, Henry shrugged, then they went on with their work.