Chapter Text
A storm raged outside the suburban house, thunder had long passed but rain still drummed on the tiled roofs. The window to a musty room rattled under the winds, causing the inhabitant to snap his head up from a book and glare at the offending noise. Aether let out a long sigh. If it was just the white noise of constant rain, or a consistent rhythm like the whirring of his fan, he could tune it out.
That window would never make it in a percussion career, he bitterly laughs to himself. He would usually find such a silly notion hilarious, to the point he would bring himself to tears just imagining such a thing - lately however, he hasn’t expressed a whole lot of anything. Apathy, his therapist had said, and he was inclined to agree.
Before his thoughts could drift to the rest of that conversation, he plunged his nose back into the book. He had been stuck on the same 2 pages for half an hour now, the rattling window proving to be the most irritating sound to read to. He only had a few pages left of the cliche romance novel, and what should have been a swift conclusion to an overly dramatic get-together, turned into a battle of whether it could win his attention over the noise.
He had to admit, it was a horrible book. The main couple dance around their feelings for 50 odd pages, before one of them caved and confessed. The book could’ve ended there, but whatever the author was on, it certainly wasn’t Healthy Relationship Juice. 200 more pages passed of petty dramas that could have all been easily avoided, had the main characters simply talked to each other. Aether was at the point where the couple’s argument had abruptly turned into a tearful second confession, but at this rate he was never going to even read the response.
Tap-tap-tap
As if on cue, the window rattled again, the frames barely containing its innate desire to dance. The atrocious book was slammed shut and hurled across the room as Aether shot all he could muster into a death glare at the window.
…Only to find a golden pair of eyes staring back at him.
The eyes immediately blinked into a blurry abyss, so quick that Aether almost thought he had hallucinated it. He approached the window cautiously, noticing the dark mass that covered one corner of it. Tapping on the window lightly, he found himself once again locking eyes with a shade similar to his own, this time close enough he could see the slit pupils.
A cat? He frowned. Perhaps it was taking shelter under the roof of his house from the storm, though clearly it was already drenched. Hastily he opened the window - even in his apathetic state, he couldn’t sit by and watch a helpless animal suffer - and the cat slid inside with a wet plop . The window was shut behind it just as quickly to keep the rain from damaging the inside of his room, and he turned to look at his new guest.
“Why, hello there,” he murmured, mostly to himself. A part of him wondered why he felt the need to verbally greet the cat, a larger part of him simply didn’t care.
The cat growled back, proceeding to try lick itself clean. Its attempts were successful, if success was measured by the rate at which the matted fur returned to tidiness, but water still dripped from every inch of its body. Aether internally groaned seeing the puddle that was building beneath its body, all over the papers scattered on his desk. Perhaps this was payback for never tidying his workspace, to have everything drenched in cat-water.
“You could at least do that in the bathroom,” he muttered, trying to move the unaffected papers away from the danger zone. A grumpy meow drew his attention to the offending cat, to find it had stopped its task to glare at him. He swallowed, wondering if he was having a fever dream. “The bathroom is over there,” he tilted his head to an open door exiting his room, and the cat promptly made its way towards it.
Yeah, definitely a dream, he concluded. There’s no way a cat could understand what he was saying. Sure, he had seen a few movies about humans being turned into cats but he wasn’t exactly about to believe it as a real occurrence. He may be a shut-in who hasn’t stepped out his own front door in 2 weeks, but he’s not that disconnected from reality.
If he really is dreaming though, it’s the most mundane one he’s had in those same 2 weeks. Maybe, things will be ok then, when he wakes. This apathy thing rocks, he mused. Feeling nothing about anything had been the best thing to happen to him after Lumine had…
He freezes, only for a moment, but it’s enough to drop whatever he was holding.
No.
He shakes his head; shakes away the thought. Once again, he returns to indifference, and his brain helpfully erases all that just transpired. The returned apathy makes him sleepy.
He turns to look at his bed, messy and unmade - yet all the more inviting for it - and before he knows it, he’s crashing face first into his pillows. He’s always so tired lately. Maybe a little more sleep will help. Even if it's 3pm, his parents probably won’t yell at him.
The last thing he remembered before passing out is a dark blob in front of his face, curious golden eyes boring into his own.
‘Aether…’