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“And get your dirty paws off of my tail!”
The small gray cat mews apologetically as she clambers off of the snake's tail, slipping like a newborn taking her first steps in the world. She lands heavy in the tall grass, fur shimmering as it becomes damp with morning dew. With a shake, she sends droplets flying in all directions, a cascade of rainbows against the morning mist. Tongue flickering irritably, Sylvian shuts his eyes against the unwelcome barrage.
“What were you even doing there? Didn’t your humans teach you not to climb on people without asking?!”
Luna, whose humans had never given her the opportunity in the first place, shakes her head, sending the last droplets of dew vanishing into the mist. “I just… you’re very warm, it feels good!”
“I am literally cold blooded,” Sylvian hisses under his breath, slithering ahead. Luna decides not to push the issue and pads on. She doesn’t want to risk a fight with her only fellow escapee.
They’ve been winding their way down the banks of this brook since dawn, and already they’re frozen to their bones and covered in bramble scratches. They move like orbiting bodies, the small bob of gray fur lurching left and then right across the path, pulled back again toward the glowering streak of scales and fangs slithering silently in the opposite direction. The morning mist hangs around them like a thin blanket as they trudge away from the human settlements up the hill.
After several minutes of hair-raisingly awkward silence, Luna takes another crack at conversation. “Sooooo, why’d you run away then?” The silence hangs like the fog on their backs. Sylvian slows his slither, tongue flicking in and out of his mouth. His eyes and nostrils narrow as he stares into the distance. He thinks that maybe, if he looks preoccupied enough, the question will go away. Unfortunately, when he glances back two green eyes and a mop of gray fur are still looking up at him expectantly.
“None of your business,” he grumbles with little conviction, and speeds his pace back up.
Luna bounds to catch up with him. “Oh, come on! If we’re gonna be friends on our trip we gotta get to know each other!”
Sylvain nearly spits. “Trip? We’re walking down this horrible, wet hill, and it’s cold, and my scales itch, and we have no idea where we’re going. And I don’t have friends.”
A half-second too late he realizes how pitiable that sounds. He immediately abandons his statement with a contemptuous hiss and scurries ahead. But when he glances back, those huge green eyes are looking up at him with horror.
“No friends?? What about your humans?”
Sylvain emits something between a hiss and a snort. “Your humans aren’t your friends. They’re your babysitters.” He squints. “Are… yours? Your…”
“Oh, of course!” she answers very quickly “They’re wonderful. They leave food out for me, and let me sleep in the house, and we play this fun game every morning where I meow for their attention and they pretend to ignore me! We have a blast together.”
She leans in for a conspiratorial whisper. “One time… they even let me on the couch for a little bit!”
Sylvain squints at her. “Your humans don’t normally let you on the couch?” His humans scarcely let him from the couch, the way they brought him out constantly for parties, dinner gatherings, regular evenings in front of the television. He hated that couch, hated the way it smelled of dead animals yet remained stubbornly inedible, hated the sickly, unnatural smoothness of it on his scales. He hated the sweaty smell of five, sometimes seven humans, all pressed together on it to gawk at his scales, his fangs, holding him like a boa strangling its prey.
He hated the memory of being handled.
Sylvain blinks and realizes Luna has been hesitating answering his question while he was lost in memory. “I… Well, obviously, yeah! They do, all the time!”
His nostrils narrow “I thought you said they only let you on the couch once?”
“Psh! No, no, I mean… I mean the special couch! We sit on the regular one together all the time!”
Luna quivers like prey, one fast move away from bolting. Sylvain’s tongue flickers in and out with suspicion. Matching his gaze, she pushes back with forced joviality. “You never answered my question! Why’d you run away?”
The ensuing glaring contest lasts about twenty seconds, during which Luna nearly trips over a branch and Sylvain gets smacked in the head by a low-hanging leaf. Finally Sylvain backs down.
“Well if you must know,” he grumbles, “it’s because they… they keep holding me.”
“Th-they held you?”
“Don’t act like it’s something stupid!” Sylvain grumbles, slithering ahead faster. “They treat me like some kind of toy! Constantly, all the time rubbing up against me, grabbing me, talking to me like demented parrots. They show me off to their guest humans, they coil me around them when I’m having a perfectly good time relaxing, and they put stupid, scratchy human clothes on me! Even their child human tries to pick me up with its sticky, little child human hands when I try to sleep! I can barely rest at all, the way they can’t stop holding me! I’m a snake! I should have... Why are you on my tail again?”
Luna, who has been nuzzling up against his tail, recoils like she’s been stung.
“O-oh yeah… me too, definitely. They hold me all the time, so... so annoying”
She trods ahead like she’s dragging six times her body weight, and doesn’t look back. Sylvain stares after her, dumbfounded. Something is going on with her, but he can’t quite work out what. Of course, this isn’t his problem. She isn’t clinging to his tail like a newborn anymore, so it’s all good. They’re not friends. He doesn’t…
“What do you mean it was so annoying? Your humans are your wonderful, amazing best friends who love you. I mean, that sounds horrible, but you like that for some reason! So what do you mean?”
“I... um...” Luna is studiously gazing at everything in sight except Sylvain, and he is getting exasperated. In a sudden whirlwind of leaves, Sylvain slithers in front of her and rears up threateningly. Luna’s eyes go wide. His go narrow.
“What does a human’s lap feel like?”
“Um! Like an incredibly soft… I mean, horrible pillow! So soft and comfy and... and so comfy it’s really irritating!”
“What names do your humans call you?”
Luna bared her fangs. “Cute ones! Definitely really cute ones! ...and it’s... so insulting! When they call me those!”
“What’s your least favorite thing about being held?”
“I...”
Luna falters. Then, very quietly, she says, “The fact that they never do it.”
They blink at each other. Neither knows quite what to say.
“Wait, never?”
“I don’t know!” Luna mews in distress. “We’re best friends, but they never seem to want to! I keep checking just in case, but they’re always so busy. They must be the busiest humans in the whole world!”
A shadow of doubt passes over her whiskers. “Maybe it’s because I asked them too many times! Maybe they’re mad at me and they don’t want to be my friend anymore and...”
Without quite understanding why he does it, Sylvain nudges his tail against the agitated cat, wrapping it lightly around her. It’s a small, half-committed gesture, and he’s not even sure Luna will notice. He regrets it immediately, however, as he is almost knocked over by a small furry gray face burying itself in his tail.
“Don’t push it,” he mutters gruffly. He doesn’t try to pull back, though.
Condensation drips from the leaves above, landing with soft plinks on the grass. One drop lands between Luna’s ears, but she doesn’t look up. Sunlight is just starting to poke through the mist and take its first cautious steps in the world.
It takes Luna a couple minutes to think to pull back. “Oh gosh, sorry.”
Sylvain doesn’t exactly respond, but the incline of his snout signals that no scales are ruffled. They pad on in silence for a while. Finally Sylvain gruffly pipes up.
“So why did you leave, then?”
When Luna answers, it’s with all the confidence of a kitten stepping into a bath. “Well, I love my life with my humans, I really do… or, did. But for some reason the more time I spent with them, the more I felt… empty? Like that feeling in your stomach when they haven’t fed you in a couple days, like a small little ache.”
She pauses for a minute to glance back up the trail, at the houses shining in the afternoon sun. “So I ran away. And now my stomach feels better! I think!”
Sylvain considers this for a moment. “Funny, my humans make me feel the same way.”
It was the first commonality they’d shared all day.
“Oh, but, my humans aren’t nearly as bad as yours!” Luna asserts. “I don’t feel bad about them all the time, most of the time it's great! It’s just that...”
“That it doesn’t feel like they have any idea what you need?”
“Maybe, but—”
“Like what they want you for doesn’t really have anything to do with you?”
Luna doesn’t quite answer, but her six-times-her-body-weight trodding returns. Sylvain almost trips as he realizes she’s fallen behind. When he turns to face her, something’s changed in her expression.
“I don’t think I'm gonna go back.”
“...what?”
“I’m not going back!” Luna says cheerfully, confidence restored.
Sylvain slithers after her with an agitated hiss “But... but this was supposed to be just for a day! Everything you have is there!”
“Like what? My humans?”
“Yes!”
“They don’t care about me.” She blows a fallen leaf from her paw. “So why should I care about them?”
Sylvain is rapidly slithering downhill into unfamiliar territory, and he does not like it. “Listen, Luna—” He pauses to scramble over a log. “We’ve been playing around in human territory, but if we go much further out it will be dangerous! Who’s gonna get us food? Where are we gonna stay?” He is moving faster than he’s ever moved to keep up with this damned cat. His eyes narrow against the falling leaves, and something unfamiliar trembles on his flickering tongue.
“We’ll have each other! Look, watch this!”
“Wait! You stupid—” Sylvain cuts off as Luna vanishes into the undergrowth. He stops, tongue tasting the air. “Luna?”
Silence.
Sylvain’s eyes frantically flicker over the bush. No motion. No small gray cat.
“Luna!”
Suddenly, he’s overtaken by a cascade of leaves, fur, and giggles.
“Don’t do that! You nearly g— What is that?”
Cradled in Luna’s outstretched paw, gentle as a newborn kitten, is a small field mouse.
“How...” Sylvain’s nostrils flare wide enough to swallow the moon. That unfamiliar feeling on his tongue is quivering up a storm. His mind is consumed with memory of the first field mouse he ever saw, how he’d slithered and squirmed from his human’s grip, thrashing after that panicked strip of fur with furious fangs, coming away with nothing as his humans yanked him back to his glass prison. That day he’d thought it impossible to even land a bite on one. For Luna to have caught one alive…
“I thought you’d like it.” Her grin is as wide as the sun. “First day being free to be you, congratulations!”
Sylvain’s tongue is flickering at about a thousand miles an hour. “What do you…?”
“Catch!”
Faster than his brain can react, the mouse is in the air and hurtling toward a nearby bush. His body however, is miles ahead of him.
Thrash
Snatch
Crunch
That something unfamiliar on his tongue is satisfied, like it hasn’t been in years.
Luna reaches out a hesitant paw to Sylvain. In an instant he is rearing above her, body coiling to strike, face bloody with the remains of the mouse, mouth wide with adrenalin and fangs. For the briefest moment, all her instincts scream that she should run.
Then Sylvain wraps himself around her in the tightest hug she’s ever felt, and the tightest he’s ever been happy to be part of.
“I’ve never... Luna, I never knew it could feel like this.” Sylvain’s voice is muffled in her fur, and all she can think about is how being wanted feels like the sun rays from the living room window after a week of rain.
Mouth still messy with blood, Sylvain uncoils and slides a little closer to her. “Do... you want any?”
She’s been starving, she realizes. And with Sylvain wrapped around her she feels like she could be full forever.
“That would be lovely.”
Blood drips on the grass between them, mingling into the dirt, and the house lights above seem very far away indeed.
When they’ve both had their fill and Sylvain’s finished cleaning the red from her cheeks, Luna stands up and stretches. Her fur shimmers with the late-afternoon sun.
“Well, come on then! If we’re not going back, we better find somewhere new ahead! And wherever it is, at least we’ll be with friends.”
Sylvain sputters in disbelief. “Wow, your mood goes back to cheery real fast! And what do you mean? We don’t have any friends!”
“Of course we do!” Luna doesn’t miss a beat, “I think I’ve just made one, in fact.”
Without another word she bounds ahead of the dumbfounded Sylvain. After a couple steps she glances back, hitting him with a wry grin burnished with blood red and afternoon gold.
“You coming, friend?”
Sylvain protests of course, but her smile can’t be dampened. “What! That’s not what we... I mean... I don’t have… Wait!”
She raises an eyebrow, and he thinks about protesting further, but a more important question has settled on his mind.
“How did you know?”
“Know what?”
“Know what I needed, just now with the mouse. You knew who I needed to be.” Sylvain pauses, testing the air with his tongue. “My humans never knew. I don’t even think I knew. I didn’t even know you could know that about someone.”
Luna shrugs quietly, shuffles a little closer to him. “I listened to you. Or, um... not what you said exactly, but what you were trying to say. Isn’t that how you knew what I needed too?”
Sylvain is silent. Luna is silent. The wind, very un-silent, gently caresses the grass at their feet.
“I suppose”—he nods slowly—“that’s what friends do.”
Her smile could melt the morning frost from his scales. “I suppose so too!”
She bounds ahead, down the trail to who-knows-where. He watches her pounce on a leaf just to play with it, and thinks that this kitty has so much more in her than he ever gave her credit for.
Maybe he does too. He thinks that they’ll be all right, the two of them. Together.
“Alright,” he chuckles, “I'm coming, friend.”