Chapter Text
Lily rouses from sleep, stretching her limbs. A foggy dream chases her as she wakes, whispering nonsensically of cars and pain and blood, but she drowsily shakes it off. The furry blanket covering her shifts pleasantly against her skin, and sunlight warms her eyelids. She yawns and rolls away from the sun.
Hmm. She’s on the floor. Did she fall off the bed with her blanket and not realize it? That’s never happened before. Something tangles between her legs – a sheet, maybe? And it’s… loud. There’s the sound of people, many people, and cars rushing by, and it doesn’t sound like the walls of Lily’s hotel room are muffling it because it’s just so loud. Maybe she’s still dreaming. Lily moves her tongue around her dry mouth and almost gags. Her morning breath is bad, sure, but not this bad! Definitely not dreaming. She begins to wake, but her eyes feel like they’re glued shut, and everything feels sluggish.
Smells begin to register in her consciousness, and she does gag this time. There’s smells of metal, grime, trash, food, and something sweet – soda? All around her, surrounding her, overwhelmingly heavy. It’s not even the worst thing she’s ever smelled, but the sheer strength of the smell is what finally breaks through Lily’s heavy drowsiness and flings her awake.
Her eyes snap open, but everything’s so blurry and bright that she feels a headache coming on, so she immediately closes them. No wonder she struggled to open her eyes earlier – they’re filthy, and caked in crust. She lifts a hand to scrub at them, but her limbs take so much effort to move. Lily’s starting to grow worried. It feels like she’s outside even though she has no memory of going outside, she’s on the floor, her mouth is so dry it feels like she hasn’t had a sip of water in days, and she feels like she’s wrapped in something.
Lily waits for a moment, hoping that a memory of how she got here would surface as she wakes up. Nothing. Other than straggling, seemingly random thoughts of mochas and street performers, Lily’s memory blanks. She’s outside, on the floor, and she has no explanation as to why.
I’ve been kidnapped I’ve been drugged I’m lost where am I I’m only sixteen I’m too young oh God am I supposed to be dead it hurts– Lily’s thoughts begin to blur, and she can hear her heart thudding in her chest. She feels the beginning of a panic attack coming on, something she cannot afford right now, so she forcibly shoves all of her agitated thoughts into the corner of her mind and replaces it with cold determination.
I need to get up, first, Lily thinks, the first concrete thought she’s had so far. It drifts away, getting buried by her other thoughts of where her parents could be and half-baked theories of why she’s in an alley. Maybe she’s been kidnapped, and the kidnappers panicked and stashed her away, which is why she's still alive. No, Lily can’t be thinking about that right now, she needs to get up. She shakes her head as if it’ll clear her muddy thoughts, but she’s unable to fully lift her skull and it drags against the ground. Something is very wrong. Is Lily injured? Scratch getting up – she needs to check her injuries first. Gameplan – Check injuries, get up, get help.
Okay. She has a plan. Now to follow it. Lily opens her eyes again and begins to rapidly blink to clear them, and things begin to finally come into view, though everything's still a bit blurry. She is lying on a grimy concrete floor, she notices. She’s facing a warm-toned gray-ish brick wall too, with windows up the side of it and rusty fire escapes clinging onto the building. Un-colorful graffiti and tags splatter the walls. Looks pretty New York city-ish, which means that she can’t have been taken too far. She looks behind her, and there’s a dumpster at her head, gray-yellow in color and covered with gray-blue graffiti. The space around her is littered with cardboard and trash, all dull and devoid of any bright colors. Lots of grays, she notices, setting little alarm bells off in her head, but she silences them and pushes the irrelevant thought out of her head. That doesn’t matter right now.
Judging by her surroundings, Lily must be in an alley. That makes sense – if Lily were to dump a body and didn’t feel like driving very far, she’d dump it in an alley behind a dumpster. She looks down. A furry, mottled silver and black blanket blocks the rest of her body from view, matted in some place. Odd – if she didn’t know any better, she’d say that the blanket was made of cat hair. It's pretty ugly, as far as blankets go. Weird, but hey, if Lily were to dump a body she wouldn’t use her best blanket either. Time to get it off of her. Lily gathers her strength and moves her hand.
The blanket moves with her. The blanket is wrapped around her hand. That’s weird. Lily tries to shake it off, and it just… doesn’t – it’s like it’s attached to her hand. That’s very weird. The blanket doesn’t even look like a blanket anymore, it looks like a limb.
Oh god. Lily lifts the limb, the furry limb she has control of, the furry limb that is hers, and stares at it. It’s not just a limb, it’s a paw, with mottled black and silver fur and little gray toe pads. She flexes her hand out. The paw flexes with it, claws sliding out and in before Lily’s eyes. Oh god. She can feel the claws sliding out of the paw. No, her claws, sliding out of her paws. Despite the completely alien limb in front of her, it responds perfectly to her whims. A feeling of sheer horror and wrongness begins to make itself noticeable as the logical part of Lily’s brain tries to make sense of what is happening in front of her. But the unconscious, primal parts of Lily’s brain, the parts that are responsible for knowing where her limbs are, insists that the cat paw in front of her is a part of her, and always has been.
No. No. No no nonono– Lily flails wildly, rolling onto her back. She looks down. Two furry limbs stretch by her field of vision, a furry, silver and black belly stretches where her torso should be, and two hind legs kick out at the end. Her eyes widen, but even that feels wrong – it’s like her eyelids are moving over unfamiliar eyes. She moves her eyes around and even that simple motion feels subtly off. Lily catches something in her field of view. Oh god. Lily looks down again and crosses her eyes. There’s a snout where her nose should be. It's blurry, but it's unmistakable. There is a little, furry, silver snout below where her nose should be, and a little gray-pink… nose?? At the end of it. Lily takes a harsh inhale and exhale, and her breath brushes against something, tickling something new in a way it didn’t before… this.
Whiskers, Lily realizes. She has whiskers. She twitches her face and they briefly shine in her field of vision. Those are whiskers. Humans don’t have whiskers. Neither do they have paws, nor fur, nor snouts. Cats have all those things. Lily does not look like a human, she looks like a cat. Therefore, Lily is a cat. Oh god.
No, Lily thinks. She shakes her head, hard, and her tiny body rolls with the harsh motion. No. This isn’t happening. I am not a cat. I got kidnapped, I got drugged, she thinks. And I am high on drugs. I am high on drugs, imagining that I am a cat. It makes sense. Lily had heard stories of people getting so high that they imagined they weren’t human. That makes sense, right? Maybe? Lily’s not an expert on illicit substances, but her theory begins to crumble the more she thinks about it. Drugs that make you pass out and drugs that give you hallucinations are different, and the latter are certainly more, ah, sought-after, and therefore more expensive. Why would kidnappers knock her out, give her the good stuff, then dump her in an alley? Unless…
Lily moves her legs around, then her arms for good measure, and ignores the cat legs that move in response. She sighs in relief. She’s a bit stiff and a bit weak, but that’s to be expected after lying on the floor for who knows how long. No signs of injuries or anything else, thank god. But if she wasn’t kidnapped for that, then why? For ransom? Maybe the kidnappers got nervous and dropped her off in an alley to get rid of the evidence. That makes sense. But what doesn’t make sense is how they got her here. Lily can hear the sounds of a lot of people and cars moving just outside the alley, which means that this street must be one of the busier ones, and New York is known as the city that never sleeps. How could her kidnappers have snuck her here with no witnesses? Besides, wouldn’t they have driven out further if they were worried about getting caught? Why here?
It doesn’t make sense, Lily realizes. No matter how she turns her kidnapped theory and her current circumstances around in her head, the more the puzzle pieces don't fit together. Lily's parents taught her that if something doesn't make sense (that isn't math), then it's probably not right, and that advice has worked for Lily so far. So maybe she wasn’t kidnapped just to be left for dead. Maybe it’s something else.
A dream, maybe. Maybe she’s asleep, or worse, in a coma. Lily’s heard stories about people dreaming so vividly in comas that they think they’re real, so maybe that’s what's happening instead. Lily’s back is starting to hurt from lying directly on it, so she rolls over, facing the wall again. She sees and feels her tail flick, and she resolutely ignores it.
So maybe she’s in a coma. If she is in a coma, then surely she must’ve done something to enter it. Lily closes her eyes and thinks back, willing her brain to show her what did this to her.
She came to New York with her parents four days ago, arriving on the day before New Year’s Eve. Lily was worried about Covid, but the tickets were non-refundable and she wasn’t about to miss a trip to New York City. They had settled into their hotel room in Queens and did fun, family bonding things for four days. Lily smiles when she remembers it, and ignores the odd feeling of her mouth pulling over pointed, unfamilliar teeth. Her two older siblings, for once, had been busy with jobs and college, so she had gotten her parents to herself. Worries of catching anything loomed over Lily's head, but the fun of hanging out with her parents together for once was enough to overshadow it. It was nice.
But nice memories don't help you figure out why you're in an alley, and also a cat. Lily drags herself away from the pleasant recollections and back to her goal – finding out what could’ve caused her coma. Okay, she thinks, today. What happened today. Nothing obvious pops out at her, but it feels like there’s a memory there, an important one, niggling at her, refusing to be unburied. Lily tries to focus on it but it just dissipates in her mental grasp, like she’s grabbing mist. Her brain just refuses to cooperate with her on this. Alright then, be that way, Lily thinks. She’ll make it remember, one way or another.
Trying to directly access the memory isn't working, so Lily forces herself to start remembering from the beginning of the day instead, in hopes of triggering it. Okay. I woke up. I ate breakfast. Mom and Dad said they’d go spend some time together, and they left me money and told me to stick to the main streets if I wanted to go out.
Lily begins to remember. She had ventured out of her hotel room at noon, shivering in the fresh New Year air but too lazy to go back up the elevator and change. She'd wandered with the crowd, enjoying the little bit of freedom she got, and she’d even found a little coffee place where she got an overpriced mocha and a dark chocolate croissant. After that, things began to get blurry.
Lily furrows her little cat brows, her eyes still closed with concentration. She’d kneed her forehead with her hands if she had them. Okay. So.
She walks out of the coffee shop, chocolate croissant and mocha in hand, and goes back to wandering. Lily remembers the taste of the cocoa in her mouth, and the heat of the too-hot beverage warming her hand. The sound of her own steps, and the steps of the crowd around her. They’re all masked and probably vaccinated, but she can't help but worry.
Cars and taxis rush past. Sounds from a lone street performer drumming on buckets and a nearby shop playing music clash together. New York really is something, and Lily would love to trace its streets, but she’s growing cold again so she decides to retreat to the warmth and comfort of her hotel. She had reached an intersection by that time. She turns around to go back the way she came, before juggling her items and grabbing her phone out of her jacket pocket to check for directions, just in case. She always was bad at directions. Lily had moved over to the curb to get out of the way of the relentless crowd, still standing at the corner of an intersection, facing the street. Then she looks down to unlock her phone, and then –
Bad. Something very bad happened. A chill spreads through Lily. She’s never experienced this feeling before, but Lily knows without a doubt that her brain is trying to hide something bad that happened to her. She stops for a moment, her memories put on pause. Do I really want to know what happened? Lily asks herself.
It’s rhetorical – she needs to. She dives back into her memories, transporting herself back into her past self.
Standing at the intersection, holding a half-eaten chocolate croissant in the crook of her elbow and a mocha in her left hand, using her right to navigate her phone. A chill bites into Lily’s neck and exposed hands. The cars to her left and front stop, presumably with a red light, and people next to her start walking as the light across the crosswalk changes.
It comes out of nowhere – Lily hears yelling and the screech of brakes, and looks up just in time to see a car barreling towards her, despite the red light and her supposedly safe position on the curb. All the other cars crossing the intersection managed to stop or swerve in time – lucky for them, but unlucky for Lily; there’s nobody to stop the vehicle, or even slow its momentum before it hits her. There’s no time to react, it all goes so fast. Lily watches the car come closer, closer, and then she closes her eyes.
It doesn’t just hit her, though, oh no. It collides with her, then keeps going until it hits the brick wall of a shop before the car goes through it, with Lily on the front end. Lily can hear glass crashing, falling to the ground in shards. She can hear screaming from both inside and outside the shop, then the scrabbling of shoes on wood. A woman’s voice comforts a crying child. The drummer had stopped drumming, but faint pop music from distant speakers droned on. Lily’s head throbs with the beat.
Lily opens her eyes, though one is so blurry she couldn’t see more than three feet in front of her and the other can’t be seen out of at all. She can’t move her neck, so she’s forced to stare in front of her. The car that hit her is red – no, Lily realized, it isn’t red, but it was covered in it, pooling on the silver hood and splattered across the windshield. Airbags mask the driver’s face from view, and morbidly, Lily wondered if they deployed when she was hit.
She’s pinned between a stone countertop of the shop and the car, anything below mid-torso vanished between the two objects, anything above broken, but surprisingly, she doesn’t feel a thing. Maybe she’s in shock. Lily regards her arms, both at the wrong angles, her right clearly shattered, with unfeeling fascination. Something warm trickles down her cheek, then her chin, then halfway down her neck before all sensation of it disappears. Ah. That’s why nothing hurts.
There’s an awful lot of blood around her. Lily hopes that it’s only hers. Hot tears began to make their way down her face, dripping down her chin and neck, then disappearing around her Adam's apple. This is it, she thinks, her vision starting to waver. Lily’s a dead girl and she’s only sixteen years old.
She’ll never graduate high school, or go to college, or get a job or get married or see her siblings get married or see her parents retire or–
That’s enough.
Lily forcibly rips herself out of her memories with a sob that turns into a yowl when she vocalizes it. She forces herself onto her feet, then falls over immediately and claws at her face instead. No. No no no, this cannot be happening. Lily thinks frantically. I can’t die, I’m not dead! Maybe she managed to survive, maybe she’s just in a coma. But no – Lily’s no medical professional, but she knows she couldn’t have lived. Nobody could live through that.
Lily doesn’t even remember hearing sirens before fading away. Nobody got there in time, and even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to do anything other than hook her up to machines and wait for her to die. That is, if she didn't die on the scene. You can’t come back from injuries like that. The realization sends a chill down Lily’s spine, and she slumps to the dirty ground and stares at the dull brick wall. She’s dead. Lily died, and she didn’t live but she’s alive, and she is now, undoubtedly, a cat.
Despite not even having really moved from the floor that she woke up on, Lily is done. She’s frustrated, she’s heartbroken, she’s exhausted, she’s terrified. She doesn’t have the mental energy to wonder why she’s even a cat, why she still has her memories, if she can contact her parents, anything. She’s thought enough today. She just wants to scream, then cry, then hurt something, then pass out, in that order, then either wake up as a human or not wake up at all.
Lily yells, and it comes out as a weird yowl. This only frustrates her more. She yowls, loud, then hisses, then screams, letting out all her grief. She wants to cry, she needs to cry, but tears refuse to escape her kitty tear ducts, leaving her catharsis just out of reach. It’s just so… unsatisfying. Fuck, shit, Lily just needs to get it out, she needs to do something, she can’t just sit here. She brings her paws under her and forces herself to her feet, intent on throwing herself into a wall instead, before swaying and falling over. Lily lands on something that isn’t her legs oh god it’s her tail, and she screams so loud that a few roosting pigeons she hadn’t noticed above her flutter away in a panic.
She screams again, and to her satisfaction, it comes out somewhat un-catlike. She does it again, then again, yowling and screeching at the top of her lungs. It’s not good enough. Lily desperately wants to grab hold of something and squeeze, to damage and break, or to start running and jumping and clawing, something, anything, but all Lily can do to take out her anger and grief is writhe around on the floor and scream.
No, she can do better than that. Lily snarls, and places her paws below her again, hoisting herself up but crouching low as to maintain her balance. Lily can feel her tail lashing behind her, and this time she doesn’t fall over before she throws herself into the wall. It doesn’t do much – Lily still isn’t used to this body, her body, and the pain she feels isn’t enough. She screams in frustration, then gets up again, a little steadier this time, and throws herself into the warm-gray wall even harder, resulting in a brief, dull throb of her shoulder as she collapses into the ground, still facing the ugly gray wall and its uglier gray graffiti.
The wall isn’t even gray, Lily realizes on the floor, panting. It’s red. The graffiti isn't gray either. I’m a cat. Cats are colorblind. I’m colorblind now.
That realization that this is her life now only serves to make Lily angrier, and her energy is renewed. Lily throws herself into the wall again and again, and when she tires once more she claws the massive dumpster beside her until they feel like they’re gonna come off and there are gouges in the cheap metal. Then she throws herself back into the wall, hard, and sinks back down to the dirty floor.
Lily is exhausted. She’s so tired, physically and emotionally. She curls into a little ball at the foot of the dumpster, the same spot she woke up, and sob-yowls. She throws her head back and screams again, even though her voice is hoarse. Her body throbs all over. Lily should stop, she should rest, she should think about her situation and make a plan instead of yelling and throwing a tantrum like a toddler. Lily staggers back to her feet anyways, screaming all the way, and turns away from the wall she’s spent the past hour throwing herself against. She faces the gray (red) brick wall opposite her that’s probably only 15 feet across but feels like a field to her little cat body. She crouches down, snarling, with the intent of getting a good running start and hopefully knocking herself out, preferably for good. She braces herself, takes her first few steps…