Chapter Text
Xaden is in the middle of making dinner when he hears the sounds of claws on wood and high-pitched wails. He shuts the stove off and turns his head towards the commotion.
He knows danger when he hears it. The sounds of wingbeats in the distance, a wyvern’s claws impaling human flesh, the cries of pain from an injured rider—to him, these are the sounds of danger. But this—this incessant scratching at his front door, these yowls of distress—he isn’t quite sure what to make of it.
He’d spent his morning in the garden, tending to his bed of violets with utmost care and precision. Spring arrived not too long ago and the violets are due to bloom any day now. He knows it’ll be a beautiful sight so long as he remains diligent. So when he hears strange sounds from beyond his door, he knows he must investigate, lest he allow the intruder to ruin his efforts.
He keeps his guard up, cautiously making his way to the door with his twin swords in his hands.
“Who’s there?” he asks, looking through the peephole, but there’s no one to be seen.
The yowls and scratching continue, now more urgent than ever. At this point Xaden is certain that his visitor is no human. Whether it is a friend or foe, however, he cannot be certain. Nevertheless, he nudges his door open with his elbow, peering through the small gap between the door and the frame.
And then he sees it—sitting on the stone steps by his front door, a little silver cat with peculiar brown-tipped ears—staring up at him like its known him its whole life. The silver cat pounces up into the air, wrapping its limbs around Xaden’s leg and clinging on like its life depends on it. Its claws dig into the thin linen of his pants, tearing a seam by his knee and drawing blood from his skin.
“Fuck—ow, ouch!” Xaden’s swords fall to the ground.
In a heartbeat, the silver cat goes silent, retracting its claws and hopping off of Xaden’s leg. As if in apology, it lowers its head, meowing meekly.
“What the fuck was that for?” Xaden asks.
“Meow,” the silver cat responds, albeit in a language indecipherable to Xaden. Cautiously, it extends its paw out to his foot, only for him to flinch away.
This cat is danger, he thinks. Retrieving a sword from the ground, Xaden poses yet another unanswerable question to the silver cat, “Who do you belong to?”
The silver cat meows softly and nudges the top of its head against the doorframe, sticking its head into Xaden’s home.
“No, no, no, hey—don’t come inside. This is my house.”
The cat wiggles its way through the narrow space in the doorframe, dashing into the living room. Much to Xaden’s dismay, its muddy paws stain the floor, forming a track of dark paw-prints.
“Hey, come back! I swear to Amari if you jump on the couch—”
The silver cat hops up onto the couch—the white couch—and curls up in a corner, making a home for itself among a pile of pillows and woolly blankets.
“For fuck’s sake.” Xaden marches towards the cat and secures his hands around its middle in a heartless effort to excise it from his couch. The silver cat clings onto the fabric of the cushions with the desperation of an addict, hissing and yowling as Xaden pulls it away.
Eventually, Xaden wins the fight. Quite unfair, considering he’d spent his whole life training to fight demons far larger and fiercer than a lone cat. He presses the cat to his chest, holding it firmly in place as he walks back to the front door, releasing his grip only to return it to the stony steps.
As he glances out into his garden, his chest aches when he realises that a corner of his carefully maintained bed of violets has been trampled upon. His final thread of patience snaps, replaced by a deep yearning for peace and quiet.
“Go away.” Xaden slams the door shut and secures the lock, ignoring the muffled yowls of protest as he retreats into the safety of his home. With a single exhale, he wets a linen cloth and gets to work cleaning the paw tracks from his floor.
On this unfortunately eventful afternoon, Xaden learns that danger can also come in the form of a little silver cat.
A garden and some peace and quiet—that was all Xaden wanted when he returned to Aretia after they’d won the war against venin. When celebrations were in order and his people devised ways to honour his great leadership, he’d rejected it all and said, “I just need some time alone.”
And time alone was precisely what he got. Until recently, that is.
The silver cat returns on an early Monday morning, though not to his front door. Today, it cooks up a shiny new strategy; one that involves rounding the perimeter of Xaden’s home and hopping up onto the window to his bedroom. It butts its head against the glass, yowling loud enough to wake him from his sleep.
Xaden’s eyes snap open, his heart hammering in his chest as he assesses his surroundings. He raises his mental shields, clutches a sword over his chest, and forces himself to stay alert.
“W-what the fuck?” he says when he sees silver by his window. He isn’t sure if he’s still dreaming; if this ball of silver is some kind of sleep paralysis demon. But as he rubs his eyes and blinks the drowsiness away, he finds that this thing is no illusion.
“I told you to go away.” He slinks out of bed, refusing to part with his blanket as he drapes it over his shoulders. “What do you want from me? Food?”
The cat meows before bumping its head against the window.
“Okay, okay, I get it. Wait here.”
When Xaden returns with a plate of tuna, the silver cat is eerily obedient. Its amber eyes are locked not on its meal, but on Xaden’s face.
“I’m going to open this window. But don’t come in, okay?” He cracks the window open, only a little at first, hardly enough for him to slide the plate through. The cat is unfazed, unmoving, and so Xaden decides to trust it.
But as soon as he opens the window further, the little cat makes itself impossibly flat and dashes through the gap, leaping onto the floor of Xaden’s bedroom and sprinting out the door.
Xaden groans, chasing the little cat down to the living room. It avoids the couch this time, instead making itself as small as possible, curling up into a corner of the room and staring Xaden down. His attempts at approaching it are met with bared teeth and hisses.
“Come on, don’t do this to me,” he pleads with the cat as he checks the time. It’s 7:37AM. He has meetings to attend and orders to give. He sighs, understanding that he’s lost this battle, and places the plate down in front of the cat. “I have to go to work. Just eat this and leave once you’re done. Got it?”
The cat bats at the plate of tuna and licks its paw before retracting into a ball once again.
“Alright. Don’t mess anything up while I’m gone.”
“Meow.”
“If you step on my violets again you’re dead.”
“Meow.”
Xaden goes about his morning routine, changing into his uniform and running through his mental list of duties for the day as he’s done so diligently for the past eight months. But this morning is different. This morning, there’s a cat in his living room.
