Chapter Text
October 23rd, 6:18 pm
Fall in the nation’s capital is milder than you’re used to, the skies bluer and the sun warmer. It seems to match the people, somehow. As if the weather, too, was cooperating in the huge, well-oiled machine of American bureaucracy. Picture-perfect and cordial.
You have to laugh to yourself at that. It certainly doesn’t always feel that well-oiled from the inside. Besides that, Washington’s thinly-veiled antagonism towards its own municipality has left you, living with a foot in both camps, disoriented at best but mostly just pissed off.
Leaving FBI HQ and the stacks of reports you finally finished filing behind, you attempt to un-hunch your shoulders and enjoy the many shades of orange and red lining the sidewalk on the way to the Metro. A wind whips across the pavement, carrying a flurry of leaves along with it, and pulling the length of your coat away from your legs to flap behind you.
It really is beautiful, is the thing, with the sun getting low in the sky and throwing rich, golden light through the leaves and onto the columned building faces. Although you can still hear Beatrice’s voice in your head nagging you about meeting minutes and can see the colorful little blocks of time in the Assistant Director’s schedule rearranging themselves like Lego pieces, you breathe deeply and try to push it all out of your brain. There would be plenty of time for that tomorrow morning.
It’s then that you’re suddenly struck with a chill that has nothing to do with the wind. Something raises your hackles and you slow to a stop, time seeming to slow down too as your adrenaline spikes.
You’re being watched, your lizard brain informs you.
You flinch as a suited businessman that had been walking behind you has to dodge around you and then you step quickly out of the way of an oncoming gaggle of tourists, moving toward a newspaper stand and pretending to look at a rack of magazines.
Discreetly scanning your surroundings, you can’t make out any kind of threat that could have you feeling this way. DC may have been recently dubbed the murder capital of the nation, but you’re on a busy downtown street surrounded by people, and nothing looks particularly out of the ordinary.
This is probably just a weird stress response thing. You remember reading something about stress and anxieties being displaced into acute experiences in that self-help book your mom had sent you a couple of months ago. Her very subtle way of letting you know what she thinks of your new job. This probably is what happens when you spend forty hours a week organizing reports on violent crimes, though.
Satisfied that your imagination is to blame, you press yourself back into the flow of the foot traffic and continue on toward the Metro.
You’ve made it about half a block when a muffled yowl sounds from your left somewhere, likely just a confrontation between two alley cats, but there’s a flicker of movement in your periphery, and you turn toward it and find yourself facing the mouth of an empty alleyway.
Absolutely not.
Later on, you will not be able to explain exactly what drew you into this alleyway. Certainly not your own faculties.
Instead, there is some force that hooks itself into your belly and pulls you onward past the dumpsters lining the walls of the buildings and the piles of soggy, rotting cardboard.
“Wrrrao!” emerges from the direction of a bin near you, and you draw carefully closer.
Before you can discover whatever cat is hiding nearby, the crunch of gravel draws your attention back to the mouth of the alleyway, where two men have appeared and are moving purposefully toward you.
Instinctively, you begin to back away from them, but before your heel even lands on the ground, a powerful sense of vertigo overtakes you and you’re falling, the brick walls of the alley seeming to dilate around you, until you land—miraculously—on your feet.
All four of them.
You’re also shrouded in some kind of cloth, and as you struggle to wriggle free, you can hear the men yelling and their feet hitting the pavement. A hand pushes into the cloth, but you’ve managed to crawl to the edge of it and shoot out from underneath and right between this man’s legs.
Shouts follow you as you sprint out of the alley and onto the sidewalk, almost careening into a woman’s ankles. You look up at her. Very far up.
This information is still buzzing through your brain when the sight of the men emerging from the alley spurs you back into motion, scrabbling back into a run as you book it back in the direction of HQ.
You do not stop to see if they’re still following. You let the bunch of muscle, at once completely ordinary and completely alien, propel you onward.
When you actually get there, you are forced into the realization that you will not be able to open the doors and walk in. You do, in fact, seem to be a cat at the moment. Instead you round the corner and slip into the entrance of the parking garage. This will have to do.
Sticking close to the walls, you slink from the underside of one car to the next. Harder to do after hours, but in this moment you send up a prayer of thanks for the workaholics and inter-office-affair-havers to whoever is listening.
It’s not long before the sound of footsteps follows you up the sloping pavement. Just one set of footsteps; the men must have split up.
You move slowly, carefully, poised to run. As the man gets closer you can hear him huffing out breaths and muttering.
“...fuckin’ again, do I look like animal control? No. Un-fuckin’-necessary is what it is. Fuckin’ dickheads know that, too.”
His steps pause, and he exhales laboriously and scuffs around a bit.
“Jesus. What, am I gonna look under every rock in the city? Pick a different goddamn mark, you know what I’m saying? One that’s not gonna grow a tail. Ain’t that fuckin’ hard.”
You move silently on the pads of your feet to the far edge of the car’s underbelly and slip across the gap to the next one, pressing yourself low to the ground and pulling said tail in to wrap close to your body. You marvel in a detached kind of way at how well you’re handling the whole suddenly-turning-into-a-cat thing.
It’s just the adrenaline, your rational brain informs you, you’ll be freaking out soon.
Oh, ok, great. That’s great. Thanks.
A pair of shoes comes into view, and you watch silently as the man bends down to look under a car parked in the row across from you. He huffs and straightens up, and then the shoes turn and move towards you.
Your pulse rabbits, and you turn to see how far it is to the next car. What you see instead is another cat crouched next to you. Or, it’s sort of a cat; it’s sleek and black, but there’s something weirdly human about its demeanor.
The cat is looking right at you and lifts one of its paws toward—scratch that, lifts one of its hands with fingers toward its mouth in an unmistakable shushing gesture, and then sends you a frighteningly human grin.
“Fucking Christ, throwing my back out up here.” The shoes come to a stop in front of the car you’re underneath and you hold your breath as they stand there for a moment, then pivot around in a circle, as if the man is scanning the parking garage.
One torturous moment later, the man and his shoes retreat down the sloping ramp, grumbling about worker’s comp as he goes.
You look back towards your weird feline companion only to find that you’re once again alone beneath the car. A quick glance around the garage reveals no traces of the other cat, as if it had never been there to begin with.
And isn’t this just the cherry on top of this whole freaky situation? You've turned into a cat and are also losing your mind, apparently. Great. Awesome. How fantastic.
Finally, you take stock of your body, the way your limbs were folded, the pretty unmistakable fur covering them, the sensory input being more and different. Yeah, definitely a cat. Fuck.
--
After deciding that in your present state, this may be the safest place for you to be for the moment, you spend the next several hours alternating between anxiously stalking around the inside of the parking garage, napping fitfully, and experimenting with your new body.
You learn a few things of interest, mostly that you have normal feline motor skills when you let your instincts drive your body, but when you think too hard about what you’re meant to be doing with any particular muscle or body part, your motor skills regress to that of a human stuck in a cat’s body, which, you suppose, is only fair.
Learning this has meant a lot of failed attempts at jumping onto the hood of a car, though, and between the physical exertion, your earlier brush with danger, and the overwhelming panic that you keep having to fend off, the exhaustion eventually catches up with you and you find a tiny nook in the stairwell to curl up in that feels safe enough. Closing your eyes, you spare one last thought to wish desperately that if you go to sleep, you’ll wake up human in your own bed and this will all have been a long, terrible, weirdass dream.
--
The roar of an engine echoes off the cavernous concrete walls, stirring you from sleep. You stretch out one arm, splaying your fingers and crack your eyes open.
Still in the garage, then. And still a cat, you think, taking in the clawed paw extended out in front of you.
A car door slams shut, and you jump to your feet and cross the stairwell to peer around the corner towards the noise.
Several yards away, AD Skinner is rounding the back of his car and heading in your direction, briefcase in hand and eyes downcast. It must be morning already.
Relief hits you like a warm wave and you trot eagerly out toward him, meowing insistently.
His eyes shoot up at the noise and meet yours, and he stops in his tracks.
“Meow! Mrow!”
Before you really notice what you’re doing, you’ve made it to his legs and unthinkingly push yourself up against his shin.
“Mrow…”
AD Skinner looks down at you with apprehension, looks up and sighs, as if seeking an explanation, and then looks back down to you.
“Meow,” you insist.
“Just a stray, Walt,” he mutters to himself and keeps walking.
“Meooow!” you wail and trail after him. He glances down at you and his brow furrows but he doesn’t slow. You have to rush to keep up with his strides but you pace him and continue to implore him with the most persuasive meows you can manage.
When the two of you have reached the FBI building proper and you still haven’t let up, he turns to face you and lets out another long-suffering sigh.
“I’m going to regret this,” he tells himself and reaches down to scoop you up into his arms.