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Jade and Nepeta end up in the Central Valley, somehow, alone together. Jade still remembers something of space so that she can mark distances and this, with her calculations of visibility on muggy days and tendency to stick to shrubs with a high LAI, means she never gets caught trespassing in the woodlands around almond orchards. She worried about Nepeta at first. Grey-green (not glaucous) and feral. Honestly, pretty rank. So taken with noises like the screaming of mountain lions. Once Jade snapped and said panthers don't even make that noise, and Nepeta stuck out her tongue and said, yes they do, they do when- and then blushed so hard she blended in with the coyotebrush. Whatever, the verdant and dignified Huntress said, recovering. She announced she had to nap right that instant because the dew remaining from the morning was annoying. Jade didn't believe her for a second, but laid down too, pulling wet duff over herself so she wouldn't get melanoma in forty years.
Jade had her own faults born from her being alone for so long, even after the Game. She was always saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing ("Oh my god," a wheezing John choked out, "You can't just pull down your shirt to scratch your boob in public!" "John, don't freak ouuut, I'm scratching my ribcage! It just happens to be under my boob."), but Nepeta would be arrested at minimum if anyone saw her like this, for how she kept her plasma-blue claws on when stalking food to match her glinting fangs. Because of the weird-scary-weird cadence of her voice, so different from precise Rose, John, bubbling over, the indistinct muttering like a trembling aspen of Dave's. Maybe she would be shot at, like that time in the Sierras, a scare from a miner worried about his claim.
Jade eventually paid attention past her backburner anxiety and found she could barely pick up Nepeta's focused movements. Whether in montane meadow, desert cobble, ag fields. Even when reaching in the part of her mind that muddled its way through the whole starry, empty universe for her spatial sense, all but water and the air and leaves was quiet. So she stopped picking fights that had them hissing like rattlesnake tails. Jade doesn't miss Nepeta's full set of bared teeth.
As late spring begins to dry up the valley they skirt private-access roads to the rivers. The water so flat in this part of the state that they look placid. Jade wades through the shore-hugging algae to get to deeper water, the pebbles hurting her feet, nothing like the sandy beaches she remembers, making her miss her paw-padding. She says it to herself every now and then, and thinks Nepeta hears her, the way her head tilts. Nepeta climbs snags of old cottonwoods to sun herself, purring in creaking jolts, more like a cricket than a cat, telling Jade idly that her mom used to do this all the time, you know, perch up high, muscled and sleek and tinted in the moonlight.
Nepeta yowls with laughter that prickles the hairs on Jade's arms every time she tries to climb up after her ("Some spayce player you are!"). That noise, always rising to a sharp point, stills once she finally gets the hang of it. Clambering up after Nepeta, she feels a surge in her stomach and a big smile breaks her face. The tree witnessing her victory is a black walnut (Juglans hindsii), looming but multi-trunked, with fleshy green fruit scattered around it in the graminoids, which are crisp from death, even by the stream that makes the air on their sweaty skin a little cooler. Before trouncing up into the pendant branches, Nepeta batted the fruits around, making Jade giggle, and snort. The two of them end up pulling some from their pedicels and throwing them at each other, kicking their legs, throwing up arms in front of their faces. Nepeta's grin no longer has Jade's skin creeping.
Rarely, when Jade comes spluttering up from the freezing depth of the middle of a river and cuts closer to shore, Nepeta won't be in a tree. She sits, crouched, batting at the shallows. Even to Jade's blurry sight, the lines of her mouth are disdainful. Can you swim, Jade asks, going for sensitive. Not everyone is raised on an island. Nepeta slaps the surface of the water. The noise echoes, and one of the splashes hits Jade in the face. She gurgles as if it tickles. Well, nyeah, of course, Nepeta says eventually, casual. Come in then, Jade cheers.
Smack, smack, darts the troll's hand on the water. I don't like swimming, Nepeta admits. It'll be fun, I promise! Jade says. She sloshes her arms around in the water like fish fins, beaming. When Nepeta doesn't react, Jade hurls a dripping handful of water at her. Nepeta undergoes a full body bristle as if she's in a Studio Ghibli film. I suppoooose, Nepeta sniffs, I can look bad, if a friend pawnestly wants me to. Looking bad is a wild dog-paddle, her chin stretched as high as it will go despite furious, gulping breaths. But they do have fun.
It's like being a grub again, Nepeta says. They're both sprawled out on the dry soil further up the bank. They sink in it, warm and tired. Jade asks, like, being in a cave? Nepeta rolls around in the dirt like a donut hole that needs powdering. Coming out of her laughter, she says, Grubs lungs aren't fully developed, so they have spiracles to supplement their oxygen intake. I just meant it was hard to breathe! Nepeta's sitting, now, brushing the dust off of her face and neck. See, she says, pointing at little things on sections of plating Jade assumed were freckles like her own, I still have some of mine. A spark of >Investigate. For Science! goes off in Jade's brain. She reaches out to touch, draws her hand back in. Feels better when Nepeta keeps tilting her head away from her to expose her neck. Nepeta's irregular chitin segments are tough, but the small holes are softer, yielding.
Jade will watch her spiracles like Nepeta watches humans. Jade looks for contractions of muscles that will open and close the holes, like guard cells and stomata (she never sees any). Nepeta points out how people go about fish all wrong. She remarks exactly how the body movements are too fast, or too slow, disdains the archaic builds of the fishing rods. I'm surpurrised these people don't starve, she says, flipping up a salmon for Jade that she immediately throws back- don't you know there's a drought?? Nepeta frowns. Jade thinks it's odd that clouds have come over the sun this time of day, but looks up and finds none have.
Alternia, Nepeta says, is always in a drought.
Alternians apparently don't have a word for major flooding. For a few days they scamper around rows and rows of trees planted in straight lines. Sandbar willow covered in a roar of insects, sprawling mule fat, stretching cottonwoods, big-leaf maple they peel patterns in the bark of. Buckeye playing dead. Nepeta laughs with spit and fang at the regularity of the plantings' spacing and tears a few irrigation lines in high spirits. Jade thwaps her. Obviously they're put like that to direct flow of water when the river floods! she says. What's a flood, Nepeta asks, gnawing at dogbane.
The ocean comes up in Jade's mind at first. How it acted so like a constrictor by patiently working to swallow down her island with regular and persistent motion. Then she thinks about feelings, and how when Nepeta looks at her like that with her narrow narrow eyes, the urge to smile crashes about in her, impossible to resist.
It's a bunch of water, all at once, she says. It's like how you feel when you want to ship things, she says. Oh, Nepeta says, letting the plant's latex drip from her open mouth. Humans aren't that stupid, I guess, she realizes, looking delighted. Of course not, Jade says, haven't you met me? Nepeta headbutts her.
Mid-summer Jade decides to do work-trade for room and board at a small farm. More like: she was halfway into a peach and enjoying it so much, putting all her senses into her mouth, that she got caught by a lady so old that her skin's folds folded in on themselves. Nepeta froze, perched in a tree. If you want to eat, you can work, the lady says, pinching Jade's ear between her fingers knotted like corms. Trespassing is Prohibited! she says.
Jade mends fences. She takes pruners and a shovel to the Himalayan blackberries that are threatening to encroach into the pastures. She tells Nepeta not to spook the calves. Fixes the air conditioner for the old farmers' bedroom. Gets ambitious and draws up a plan for a new drip irrigation system for the orchards even as Nepeta glares at her from under the guest bedroom bed. This place is boring, Nepeta says.
Under the lady's squint Jade explains that she has to go, to visit a friend, and thanks so much for the work. The lady sends her off with a crate of peaches and some cash. Jade and Nepeta sit on a levee thick with star thistle and gorge on the peaches for dinner. Then Nepeta smashes the crate with vigor and joyful yells. Baby turkeys flee; Jade throws herself back onto the earth and laughs.
Jade has to stop Nepeta from shredding the money, too. We might as well do something with it, she says. Nepeta shrugs.
They walk along the 99 where Jade has to restrain Nepeta from snacking off of the dead dogs on the side of the road ("Imagine if I tried to eat something that looked like your mom!"). Cars hurry past on the sections more like a freeway, idle at lights where the highway goes through small towns. They go into a Starbucks, incongruous among all the tree of heaven and the trucks flying by. Jade buys a pastry with Nepeta half-crouching behind her. People stare. Jade's been taking showers lately, but Nepeta smells like corpse and the underground. Jade stuffs all of her money into the tip jar and half-carries Nepeta out. Away from the neighborhood, Nepeta eats most the pastry, and makes a face. Jade finishes it and concedes that it is nothing to Jane's talent. Gamzee can do much better, Nepeta agrees.
They go back to hunting and fishing and digging up wild onion.
Late season heat nothing to an islander, a hunter, they curl up against each other in the shattered grass like jackrabbits. Sometimes Nepeta is gross and licks Jade's forehead accidentally when trying to comb back her bangs from her eyes, but Jade isn't showering like a normal human being anymore so finds it easy not to care.
I cat help it, Nepeta offers, whenever Jade flinches extra hard. It feels weird, Jade complains, joking mostly. Nepeta settles into a enthusiastic explanation about papillae and how although humans and cats have the same four kinds of tongue structures and although the same kind of structure is the most numerous on both species, cats' tongues are rough because their filiform papillae's membranes have more keratin.
Jade, glasses in her lap, squinting at a vague-shape-of-Nepeta under a dim moon, says, you're a troll. when did you learn about humans? Nepeta rolls her eyes and says what do you think I'm doing on my tablet all the time we're stealing wifi. Reading people's roleplaying logs, Jade says. True, Nepeta says, flaring her nose. Also, you're not actually a cat, Jade adds, and gets batted at, but not hard. Jade pushes Nepeta back with a crow of laughter and they end up tussling. In the aftermath they poke at each other's scratches, gifts from the dead branches of the elderberry they were sitting under. Jade has more, and squirms a little at Nepeta's careful touch, the still gross little dabs of her tongue she insists will help them heal faster.
Okay, so, obviously, Jade does care! Not about the gross part. Maybe...about...
One evening she swallows down the sudden rush of saliva from under her teeth that accompanies her nausea at realizing, again as so many times, how close their faces are as Nepeta tends to her hair, and asks, is. isn't this, uuuum, are you being pale? Nepeta starts, pupils enormous, pulls back, starting to say no, starting to say other things, but mumbles something about being purrsumptuous and darts off through the wild oats. Jade takes a couple of breaths with her heart papillaeting in earnest. Palpitating. Does count as a cat pun if humans have papillae too? Jade thought, and then shook her head, no, there's all sorts of pawful generic ones that could just as easily apply to a ton of animals- focus. Nepeta!
Immediately after leaping up Jade steps on her glasses. She feels a lens pop out; the other screeches across gravel. Fuck! Shit! and the moon is matte-black and she knows Nepeta's life-long practice of stealth surpasses what remains of her control over space. She flares her nose and then flinches, forgetting as always she's no longer a hound. Whatever! she yells to herself, and crashes in the direction she thinks Nepeta has gone.
Jade starts getting scared. All she's doing is following the path of least resistance, but Nepeta easily could have taken another direction entirely. It's hard to navigate at all. She has to keep breaking through branches of trees and shrubs, worry about stepping into wasps' nests.
Nepeta! she calls, dropping to her legs in a field of tall herbage. It's mostly white sweet clover, its perfume heavy on the air.
I'm sorry, I'm really sorry! Nepeta cries barely ten feet away, scaring the shit out of Jade.
No, she says, trying to catch her breath, stop her heart from hammering. Even if she were still a dog she would've never found Nepeta here. No, it's my fault, I didn't mean to say that- I know you and Equius are, you know, like, forever-
It's, um, not really, uh Nepeta says, coming closer, Jade only telling by the volume of her shaking voice and the sounds of crunching stems, I was just, you know-
Me too! Jade says.
All of a sudden her arms start burning. Holy shit, she says. Oh my god, that hurts. What??
Nepeta scrambles over. What's wrong? she asks, sounding emptied of air.
Must've run through some nettles, Jade says, gritting her teeth. It's okay! it doesn't last for very l-
Nepeta's started to lick at the welts. They feel better right away, the stinging fading.
Thank you? Jade says.
I don't want you to hurt, Nepeta says, after she finishes Jade's other arm. I don't want you to ever hurt, or be scared, you know.
Nepeta is silent for a while, as Jade rubs her arms. I mean, like, in a red way, Nepeta says. She puts a hand on Jade's, gently, like a question.
Jade goes Oh! and starts laughing. Me too!
She bundles Nepeta into a hug, and they tumble into the clover. Nepeta licks Jade's nose. Jade tries back, but misses and gets an eyelash instead. They giggle, and touch knuckles, and breathe evenly, side by side, in the white clover under a black moon.