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Fulgur stares out at the unfamiliar world around him. “I need a drink and a nap,” he mutters to himself.
Mere moments ago, he'd been living three-hundred and seventy-five years after the end of humanity, as an archivist-turned-legatus at war against the Martyrists. Right here, right now, there are humans walking around the streets below, without a care to the destruction they'd leave in their wake, years in the future.
They don't have a trace of electricity on them at all, save for the near-silent electric waves of their devices - mobile phones, Fulgur thinks they were called, once-futuristic objects turned into artifacts in Fulgur’s time. One had come into his hands during his time as an archivist. He’d played around with it, so he knows how to use one. Probably. He’s not sure if the phone he’d used was newer or older than the ones in this time.
He’ll probably need one, if he’s to survive here. Judging by the modernity he sees around him - or rather, lack thereof - Fulgur doesn’t think he’ll be able to return to his original timeline, not for centuries. Other than the issue of where to get a phone in the first place, it’s not too bad here, all things considered.
When he finally clambers down from the roof he’d landed on, he realizes he’s struck gold - this empty house has been marked as ‘haunted’ and ‘not for sale’, but Fulgur doesn’t fear the unknown. He’s a fighter.
The inside of the house is a little dusty, but otherwise in good condition. He’s not sure how long he’ll stay. But for the time being, this will be Fulgur’s home.
A few days later, Fulgur gets himself a phone and computer. They’ve been abandoned for having faulty batteries and broken screens, but Fulgur fixes the batteries easily by wiring them to his metal joints and allowing himself to act as a human battery. He gives up on the screens. As long as they work, he’s fine with it.
A problem crops up not long later - it's too cold and dry, which makes his joints creak like old rusty door hinges. Although he doesn’t feel the ache, since he’s pretty much half metal, he needs lubricant to oil them up again. Thankfully, money isn’t a concern when you’re relatively good at being sneaky, so when he finally finds a shop selling something similar to the type he’s used to getting, it’s not too hard for him to acquire it.
Fulgur feels much better now that he can move properly again. Still, he must cover his metal arms and legs, just in case someone looks at him weirdly. There’s only so long he can call himself a ‘cosplayer’ and get away with it.
On the way home, Fulgur hears a miserable yowl. There’s not a person in sight, barely a street lamp to light the way, so who’s yowling?
Fulgur looks left, right, in front, behind… It doesn’t occur to him to look up until he hears the rustling of leaves.
Surely enough, sitting atop the tree next to Fulgur is a cat. It’s a very strange-looking cat, to be honest. Fulgur has never seen purple cats, not even the ones with technological advancements.
“Huh,” he says.
The cat blinks down at him with mismatched magenta eyes. “Meow,” it says back plaintively.
"Are you stuck?” Fulgur asks a few seconds before the sheer stupidity of it sets in.
It's a cat. It doesn't even understand him.
The cat meows back at him, which makes Fulgur snort. It takes a step forward, feels the branch beneath it wobble, and retreats to a position of relative safety.
Look, Fulgur may call himself a cold-hearted Legatus, but he’s not that cold-hearted, come on. Anyone would rescue a cute cat if it was stuck in a tree. Well, except Vulpes, probably. That guy would just point and laugh.
So Fulgur sheds his large coat, much to the cat’s apparent surprise, and climbs up the tree. “Here, kitty kitty, come on over.”
There's a tag around its neck that says ‘Uki’. It - or rather, he - must be someone's pet.
Uki blinks at Fulgur’s metallic red and black arm, carefully tapping at his fingers with purple-furred paws before slinking over. Fulgur isn’t used to cats - he knows they're not particularly affectionate, they've never clung to him as they did to Professor Canis - but this one prances along his arm, curls itself around his shoulders, and makes himself at home.
Huh.
Fulgur doesn't complain, instead sighing and trying his best not to jostle the thing as he climbs down. “Alright then,” he grunts when his feet touch flat ground again, “off you go, scram.”
Uki leaps off his shoulders without a care in the world, probably to return home, wherever that is. Fulgur doesn't register that he has an extra shadow until he gets home and starts hearing an extra pair of footsteps.
He stares at Uki, who has settled onto Fulgur's favorite armchair and is now licking his paws like he owns the whole damn house. Fulgur stares at the cat, whose tail swishes languidly. “What are you doing here?”
“Mrrrowww.”
Clearly, Fulgur will get no helpful answers from his new housemate. No matter how hard Fulgur tries to shoo the cat out of his temporary house, Uki refuses to leave, and when no ‘Missing Uki!’ posters appear after a few days and a few bags of emergency cat food, Fulgur realizes that it’s a bit of a lost cause.
So now he has a furry housemate who steals his food, steals his seats, and thinks his face is the best place to nap when he’s trying to sleep.
For some reason, Fulgur still can’t think of any reasons to complain. It is nice to have a companion who won’t nag him or criticize him or pose any danger to him other than wanting to use his legs as a scratching post.
Fulgur starts getting used to living in this new world alongside a cat. Everything is going well - he’s connected to the wifi, people keep complimenting his cynets, and he’s got a temporary job at a bookstore. The rats running around under the floorboards have cleverly decided to make themselves scarce now that Uki is here, even though Uki makes no effort to catch them. Everything is fine until he realizes his cat food for Uki is disappearing at alarming rates.
He’s pretty sure he doesn’t feed Uki too much, and the cat doesn’t seem to be gaining too much weight, although Fulgur honestly can’t tell under all that fluff…
The truth is finally revealed when he catches a brown tabby trying to sneak into the house through his window.
Whenever he leaves the house, Fulgur is certain he leaves the windows shut but not locked. Clearly, the brown tabby tomcat he catches trying to ease his window open with a claw is a seasoned pro at break-ins.
Fulgur picks the cat up with ease, holding it up suspiciously. “You,” he murmurs, “so you’re the thief.”
The cat almost seems to beam at him, green and brown eyes twinkling mischievously as his tail swishes. That, undoubtedly, is the face of a certified trickster. Uki, well-behaved as he always is, jumps onto the table just to watch Fulgur admonish the new cat. “You’re just a little shit, aren’t you?”
“Meow!”
Fulgur will take that as a yes, then. Just like Uki, this cat has a name tag, and it says ‘Alban’, but by the looks of things, nobody has taken care of Alban for a long time either. “What are you here for, hm? Just trying to stay out of the cold?”
“... Meow!”
Alban leaps out of Fulgur’s arms, clawing at the space where Fulgur always hears rats scurrying around under the floorboards. Fulgur hears alarmed squeaking beneath his feet, and Alban looks at him with a look of innocence only the guilty can wear.
Still, Alban is just a cat, and Fulgur is just a cyborg with the heart of a human. He sighs heavily. “Alright, fine, fine, do whatever you want.”
Fulgur regrets saying that when he catches Alban trying to swipe his wallet out of his pocket, but oh well. Nobody ever said cats were angels. Uki, on his best behavior as always, only looks at Fulgur smugly.
Fulgur comes to realize that while Uki prefers to stay inside the house and stare at Fulgur or move his things for him like he’s a psychic cat, Alban seems to have an agenda of his own, sneaking in and out of the house for god knows what reason.
A few days later, Alban brings home a friend. The sunshine-yellow cat, apparently called Sonny according to his collar, or possibly Taichou, or both, bobs his head at Fulgur in some kind of greeting, and proceeds to disappear under the floorboards for the next two hours.
Fulgur hasn’t even had time to process things before Sonny reappears, scrabbling out of the floor like a monster from the depths, covered in so much dust he looks gray instead of yellow. And… is that blood around his mouth?
Sonny places the rat in his jaws at Fulgur’s feet before disappearing under the floorboards again.
And then he brings Fulgur another rat.
And another.
And another.
And another.
And another.
And another.
And another.
And-
“Sonny, how many rats are you going to bring me?!”
There is only one thought in Fulgur’s head, and it goes something like: crazy? I was crazy once. I got a cat. And then another cat. And then the other cat got me one more cat. And the last cat kept bringing me rats. And rats make me crazy. Crazy? I was crazy once…
Uki meows, seeming somewhat awed, and Fulgur realizes that he can no longer hear the squeaking of rats under the floorboards. For the first time in a long while, everything is quiet.
He does his best to shake the insanity out of his head. Sonny, the proud hunter of what seems to be Every Single Rat Under the Floorboards, looks at Fulgur expectantly, his tail swishing as he sits behind his pile of dead rats. Praise me , says those lilac eyes. I’m a genius.
Fulgur attempts to pet Sonny, only to be hissed at and almost scratched. “Uh, good job?”
Sonny promptly sneezes all over both of them, getting dust all over the floor. Alban manages to bounce away just in time. Clearly, it’s bath time for Sonny, even if Sonny despises being picked up and hates water just as much. Fulgur’s fine with it - his cynets are waterproof, and as long as Sonny doesn’t claw at his skin, it won’t hurt.
Later that week, Fulgur thinks to himself: huh . For a guy from the distant future, he seems to be adapting very well to this life. Alongside his bookstore job, Fulgur is also a ‘streamer’ now. Apparently, people think his past as a Legatus is a story from his fanciful imagination, and are willing to pay him to tell them more, for some odd reason.
Oh, and they also love to see his cats.
Fulgur wouldn’t call it love, per se, but he’s most certainly used to living with his three cats more than he expected. He doesn’t even like cats that much, but for some reason he doesn’t mind the obvious dent all those cat toys are putting in his bank account.
It's like he's Shen Qingqiu, and he has multiple sticky Bingmeis following him around, yowling for attention.
Whenever he goes to sleep at night, it’s with Uki wriggling under the covers with his furry little face shoved in Fulgur’s armpit, Sonny batting at Fulgur’s metal toes while Fulgur resists the urge to punt the cat because it tickles, goddammit , and Alban lying flat on Fulgur’s face because he’s a little demon that way.
Fulgur goes to sleep covered in fur, wakes up covered in fur, goes about his day pretty much covered in fur whether he wants to or not.
But being with his cats, no matter how sweet (like Uki) or devilish (ahem, Alban, Sonny) they are, doesn’t change the fact that Fulgur craves a little more human interaction.
Winter here, it seems, is no less cold and lonely than it was during his original timeline. He sighs heavily, finally perched on his favorite chair for once. Uki has taken revenge in the form of making Fulgur’s lap his seat.
“I’ve been kicked out of my original timeline, all my comrades are dead, and all I have now are these cats,” he murmurs to himself as Alban struggles to open Fulgur’s new cat-impenetrable wallet and Sonny chases the shadow of the bird outside the window somewhere behind him, “but they’re not even technically my cats.”
“Jeez, that’s so fuckin’ tragic.”
Fulgur blinks at the accented voice behind him. He doesn’t even know any Australians, let alone have one in his house . Fulgur turns around to look, spotting a stranger lounging by the windowsill. Wait, hadn’t Sonny been behind him?
Better yet, where’s Sonny, and who’s the strange policeman with neon-yellow hair by the window?
Fulgur shrieks when Uki disappears in a puff of smoke, and a handsome purple-haired man reappears in his place, sitting on Fulgur’s lap and smiling at him with amused pink and magenta eyes. “We’re not actually cats, by the way.”
To Fulgur’s horror, Alban transforms into a brunette man with the same eyes as Alban the cat, one that Fulgur recognizes from the wanted signs plastered around town. This guy is a phantom thief! What is he doing as a cat? In Fulgur’s house? And what are the two cat ear-like things nestled in his hair? “Okay Uki, but some of us kind of are cats.”
Fulgur can feel the beginnings of a monster headache pounding away in the back of his skull. “I really, really need a drink. Like, enough tequila to make me pass out.”
“Tequila!” Sonny chirps. “I love that song!”
Needless to say, Fulgur is now regretting all his life decisions.
