Chapter Text
Puss reacted to the song before he even registered the tune. A smooth, eerie, soaring, echoing series of notes resonated through the shambles, corridors, and ruins where the cat found himself.
Even after Death had stopped pursuing him, the whistle stayed in his ears, in his dreams, in his waking moments, forever floating rhythmically through his head while he scrambled and spat and clawed and fought for his life.
After all, Puss was still terrified of dying.
Sure, most of that fear had turned more into a healthy respect than a disregarded joke or all-consuming anxiety, but he was still afraid of it, of the prowling, hunting wolf that had been out for blood back at the Wishing Star.
Puss pushed himself up, scrambling and clawing his way through fallen rocks, determined to meet his end on his feet. Mentally, he cataloged his injuries. His head pounded. A concussion, maybe. His limbs ached with bruising and overuse, and his breathing felt a bit odd like he was close to having knocked something out of place the last time the tower had been hit.
It was still standing, judging by the fact that the floor was still where it should have been, and he hadn’t felt any other impacts since he had woken back up, so something was making whatever had been attacking the tower lay off.
His once-over hadn’t revealed anything that should have warranted a final visit from Death, but the wolf appeared in the corner of his vision all the same, his maw shaped around the whistle.
Puss steadied himself, placing one hand against the wall to keep himself upright as he retrieved his sword, pointing it at Death. The wolf merely tilted his head before he trudged up the stairs.
Was he trying to lure Puss somewhere?
At a loss, the cat gave in and followed the entity up the stairs, stumbling his way up each step as he followed the song.
When he made it back to the outside, leaning on the wall as the floor spun, he smelled smoke. He heard a burst of familiar wild laughter, high-pitched and grating even with its distance.
“The Cat,” Death mused. “I almost wonder what you did to anger him, but I know how aggravating you can be.”
“That double-crossing,” Puss wheezed. While Kitty had a few enemies that they steered clear of, they tended to run into more that Puss had managed to aggravate, often without him having realized that he had made an enemy. “I never met him before he hired—“
Where was Kitty? She wasn’t up at their meeting spot, which meant that unless she had left him, she was still on the side that she had gone to look for the fiddle in.
“You aren’t here for me, are you?” Puss asked, horrified.
“I only wish I was.”
Bracing himself, the cat sprinted across the roof past Death, passing through the hall and picking through the wreckage of the stairs as quickly as he could, following the whistle that was suddenly below him, clinging to crumbling walls as he looked for any sign of dark fur, even any scraps buried beneath recently disturbed ceilings.
Finally, heart racing, breath coming out in pained gasps, Puss rounded a corner and found Death crouched over Kitty’s body.
“You didn’t make it in time,” Death said, the words obviously meant for Puss rather than the corpse that the wolf tended to.
He tried to answer but found himself struck dumb by the implication that Kitty had been dying before he had even thought to look for her. It was horrifying. The scent, blood, and smoke cloyed in the air, the sight of his best friend laying broken across the floor, red spilled onto the beige carpet beneath her head.
It felt like the floor had fallen out from beneath him, to see her curled up as if she had been in pain, to see a perfectly white paw crusted with drying blood that glinted in the fair light, smeared across her whiskers, to watch her for breath and to see no sign of movement, to look and see that her eyes were open, pale blue staring out at nothing.
There were several larger chunks of rocks further down the path from her. It seemed like the roof had caved in here, too. Though she had made it several feet before whatever had gotten the lucky hit had taken her out. Instinctively, Puss reached up to his own head to feel around, though his paw came back clean. How unfair was it, that he had survived falling rocks, but Kitty hadn’t?
He had asked, at some point, how many lives she had left. They were around the same age, but Puss had rarely come across other cats with the same level of humanity as his own, especially not ones who lived similar lifestyles, so it was interesting to hear how many he had unnecessarily squandered away.
Kitty had lost three lives before, though she had not gone into any detail about how these had occurred. She had six opportunities left. Because that's how Puss had always seen extra lives—just another chance to try something.
Was this how he had looked to outsiders?
Five lives now, Puss noted, as Death rose, something folded tightly in his grasp.
“Gato.” Puss straightened up as the wolf turned to him. “Will you survive the trip down, or will I have to stay nearby?”
Taking a deep breath, Puss searched for his voice. “Just be around the next time I get my hands on The Cat.”
Death nodded and vanished the next time Puss blinked.
On the floor, Kitty moved, just a bit. Then she groaned, clutching her head. “Puss?”
“Softpaws,” he knelt before her.
“Your friend was here?”
“He goes where he wants,” Puss swallowed, unwilling to tell her that she had died while she looked so dazed, though he suspected that she knew, or would know once she had a moment to sit down and think about it. “The Cat betrayed us. As soon as you can move, we have to get going. There’s smoke. I think he set the lower levels on fire.”
“Mierda,” Kitty muttered hoarsely, barely making it to her feet. “Over a fiddle?”
“Not even something more dignified, like a guitar,” Puss agreed, moving closer to help steady her, fixated on how she breathed, how she moved, and he tried to forget that he had ever seen her so still.
“Well,” Kitty peered at the stairs. “Maybe you can hit him over the head with the guitar, this time.”
“It was one time,” Puss groused as he helped her up and past the wreckage.
On the top of the tower, they peered down into the dark, lit with the flickering of fire on the lower levels, and of civilians who had stepped out to take a look at the chaos.
Puss did a mental inventory. Since Kitty was still rather slumped against him, and the pounding in his head, while still present, had somewhat diminished, he was the only one clear-headed enough to safely get an idea of what they were doing for the moment being.
They were both heavily injured and needed to retreat before they made any moves against The Cat. A check confirmed that they both still had their weapons. And there, a knife resembling the ones that Bo-Peep had been throwing was stuck in the cracks in the wall, pointing towards the back of the tower.
Puss was rather certain that its presence represented the promise of a later fight, offering an invitation for them to follow her. Sure, they were both too heavily injured to get into another fight right away, but Bo-Peep had seemed the sort to want a fair fight for her revenge or whatever she was after. If they went down and immediately split instead of following any other path that the woman had left for them…
The back side had fewer people clustered around it, as it was closer to the houses. Most of the crowd was out in the square just in front of the tower.
Puss glanced at Kitty when she pulled away from him and staggered over to catch her weight on the wall instead. She took the knife carefully, prying it out from the wall as she braced herself for what would usually be an effortless maneuver. Then she nodded to him.
They had managed more with less.