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A smear of sunlight trickled into a bedroom whose only audible noise was the light, dream-immersed snoozes and shuffling of its dwellers and the pitter-patter of last night's raindrops from outside. It angled onto and adorned the faces of Heracles and Kiku, who were sprawled out along navy blue and cream-colored covers.
They were not entirely alone. Pochi, Corporal Cat, and Tama, were cuddled up next to the duo in the remaining patches of bed space. Pochi laid beside both of their sides, the knuckles of his paws brushing Kiku gently. Corporal Cat protected his caretaker Heracles by lying on top of his head, and Tama weighed down Kiku's feet apathetically.
Kiku was the first to lift his eyelids. As he pried his arm from under where it intertwined with the heavy sleeper, leaving their warm embrace with slight regret and slowly dragging his feet out from under that tuna-obsessed cat of his, he tiptoed ahead to open the sudare blinds and the window. The room grew brighter, and the cool, drizzly air circulated in.
As he clasped his hands together, he shut his eyes to whisper in a chant to himself.
「いつも私たちを見守ってくれてありがとう」 ("Thank you for always watching over us.")
While Kiku was in many respects the modern man that Akira Kurosawa envisioned as the Novelist in Ikiru, every morning, he basked in the Sun and thanked her for the nourishment that she provided Earth. It was not out of superstition—much less that dark shadow of fanaticism—but personal spirituality that he tried to behold her. Morning (朝) was ten months and ten days (十月十日), for every day was a rebirth.
As he wondered what Heracles, the more philosophical of the two, thought of morning, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Heracles sitting upright, holding both their cats in his arms while Pochi was yawning and stretching midway between the bed and the window. His gaze was relaxed yet clearly facing the familiar person in front of him, and the corners of his mouth turned up a bit.
"Καλημέρα αγάπη μου." ("Good morning my love.")
While Heracles set the cats down fron his hug, the touch of their silky fur lingering in his body's memory, and lifted the covers off himself, he sluggishly stood up and placed his left arm around Kiku's upper waist. He leaned his head in to be held by the slope of Kiku's shoulders, brushing light kisses over the other's neck. Kiku turned to the side to meet Heracles' hazel-green eyes and initiate a chaste kiss on the lips.
They were now marvelling last night's raindrops dripping from the roof in crystalline radiance and the vivid, shimmering leaves that surrounded them. The trees, with their long and pointed leaves, appeared almost surreal. They had already reddened into a deep scarlet nearer to their abode as others dispersed into oranges and yellows. Some of the holdouts shined a translucent lime green in the light. The warmth that they held under the covers had nearly dissolved and departed from them, leaving slight goosebumps on their arms.
"What is morning to you?" Kiku asked.
"It is great..." Heracles replied. "What is morning? When Helios starts to ride across the sky in his chariot, and we greet the dawn, I think that we bestow on ourselves a new spirit that rises above the night of the past. We affirm life."
Kiku beamed hearing Heracles speak with vigor about the Greek gods. While Heracles asked many questions and thought a lot about all kinds of subjects, he tended to estrange others due to the pensive weight that they carried. Several people saw him as adrift in useless philosophizing and fantasy at best and too opaque, inconstant, and rambling at worst. Yet Kiku loved him all the more for remaining true to who he is, even if what he spoke took deciphering.
"I see. We have a similar idea. Morning, asa, is written ten months, ten days, totsuki-tooka, how long until a child is born. Every morning we are reborn when Amaterasu leaves her cave of isolation."
However sharp their individual differences were, both of them knew of ancient cultures enthralled by the "all too human" nature of otherworldly beings.
The more sand in the year's hourglass slid past midway at its concavity, the nearer they drew to a point of the year when this idea was often at its highest. By the harvest season, the dual-natured kitsune foxes foraged in the forests on the lightest of feet, in their parabolic leaps, and Kronos's scythe and Demeter's sorrows severed the passage between verdant, summery life and barren, wintry death.
As for harvests, when Kiku offered to start breakfast, Heracles insisted that he wanted to treat Kiku this time. Kiku surrendered, not too begrudgingly, under the condition that Heracles could cook a meal that gave a taste of his Mediterranean home. Food was no longer just food. Food was connection to people of past, present, and future and realizing that the first and last were memory and imagination.
"How about rizogalo?" Heracles asked, thinking that it would be using ingredients that Kiku probably had. Later they could make must biscuits, if they found any grapes.
"I don't mean to ask so much, but have you seen the cost of rice here lately?" It was barely visible, but Kiku's cheeks were reddening to a shade of coral. A little pout emerged across his mouth as he averted his eyes and seemed to curl away into himself.
Heracles was impressed that Kiku knew about the dish and, at the same time, tried containing a slight snicker at how ill-tempered Kiku was at times. He had to ignore the tingling feeling in his hand to search for his phone, take a photo, and call Sadik.
"Is Abel rubbing off on you?" Heracles abruptly observed. Abel was Kiku's close friend, a trusted albeit particularly stingy confidant during times when Kiku was reluctant to meet or speak with anyone else. On personal matters, Kiku had a tendency towards capricious spending, giving into temptation at odd times that made sense not even to himself. To try stopping this, he chastized himself, and sometimes even others. It was nonetheless a tense subject.
"I suppose. I'm not the one who wants to get rid of the concept of debt."
"That's because you're a business sell-out."
"And you're a whiny daydreamer."
Kiku's eyes widened a smidge, realizing the salt that he added to the wound of Heracles' situation. He looked down to the side a little before redacting that last one, flinching at the sudden escalation of epithets and trying to soften his words again.
"I'm sorry for that... What I mean is, there isn't enough to save some in case of emergencies. We can buy more later today."
"That's fair. I'm sorry, too." Heracles gave a sympathetic look.
Before Heracles' relationship with Kiku, he left the city where he had stayed from one temporary residence to the next, to hide out on his own, effectively jobless, in an abandoned seaside house with antiquated appliances. He cited the freedom, change of his values, and exhilaration that it gave him as a motive, but circumstance also drove him away, as reluctant as he was to take it as earnestly.
In that time, he gradually reached a point of resorting to stealing from some of the crops and other supplies of the locals and posting the most purposefully inflammatory and belligerent posts to trade engagement for money, which he was always remorseful about on an ethical level. He had since returned and replaced what he took from the locals, who looked on him with a compassion that astonished him.
Every trace of his online presence also vanished, a sudden shift that was not welcome by his followers. News of his relationship with Kiku Honda, whom he didn't know before, later broke out, and his past identity was leaked. Ex-followers abroad mocked his preference for men, in unusually immature fashion, as supposedly typical of a Grecian and a likely prelude to the very vices that he condemned. Such was not helped by the background of whom he was now with.
Yet the change of heart was unsurprising and welcome to anyone else with some semblance of sanity left... and to Kiku, when Heracles told him about his past. For now, they were staying overseas at a house of his to help restore Heracles's privacy, which he now felt a need to guard, especially in the aftermath of bygone days.
Nevertheless, Heracles felt no need for Kiku to immediately "fix" him or turn into a doting mother hen to constantly provide for him. It did not sit right with him to lose much of his autonomy, a core of himself where he was rather stubborn. Kiku never asked him to do so, either.
Their relationship would be one purely of love, not business exchanges, in contrast to the golden calf that Kiku's life began to revolve around, at least away from his seasonal house that stood out of time. The direction concerned Heracles a tad, and deep down, it also haunted Kiku. For now, it was a whale that had yet to resurface for air. Some time, it would need the oxygen. It was just a matter of when.
"Hm... We have ingredients for tsoureki. I could use substitutes to bring out the sweetness."
"That sounds great. Is that the Easter bread?"
"Yeah, I prepare it around Easter, but I still enjoy it year round."
"I'll at least get the flour and the eggs out. You can tell me the rest, or do it yourself if you so insist."
"I do."
"If only you'd say that again one day."
Heracles noticed an upward crescent forming on Kiku's lips.
Bundled in layers of long-sleeves and sweaters, the two were sitting side by side, facing the foliage outside again. All the pets disbanded inside and outside of the house. Pochi sauntered around, eyeing the neighbor's squashes that were just about ripened, while Corporal Cat moved in and out of the house, and Tama was laying back down in the red leaves that adorned the canopy of grass. Heracles was thinking if only the pets could be purely wild animals.
"Did you have any interesting dreams?" Kiku inquired.
A month ago, there was an unexpectedly somber follow-up to one of Heracles's daydreams about being reborn a cat, unfettered by the responsibilities of daily human life. In a dream, Cat Heracles had escaped from behind the glass display at a pet shop, only to find that his mother cat was missing. Ever since, Kiku had taken an interest in examining Heracles's dreams and flights of fancy to see what they might say about their lives. Naturally, cats were a recurring theme.
"Hmm, I did, but I'm not sure if I should tell you."
"Eh? Why not?"
"It's embarrassing..." Heracles twisted a strand of his brown, curly hair with his right finger, averting his eyes.
"Heracles, my point is not to judge you." Kiku leaned towards Heracles, who was turned away, before Heracles met his eyes again.
"All right. I dreamt that you were partly a cat..." Kiku accidentally raised an right eyebrow but otherwise remained silent.
"Every human who could become a cat had the power to affect the felinity of humans who came into contact with them. You had a garden of squashes and sweet potatoes. Inside a house, you were brewing potions in glass beakers with no companions. When I looked up to you, I didn't know if I should approach you... I wanted us to roam together freely as cats in the wild, passing abandoned temples, but I didn't want to make you lose the other humans that you loved. We could always reclaim the garden...
"One day, I was curious what would happen if we got close... Nothing changed when I stood silently behind you, but I pressed my paw onto your leg. I got scared of what might happen and pranced away quickly... Because I couldn't stick to one or the other choice, you were half-transformed, taking the ears, eyes, whiskers, hand paws, and tail of a cat."
"That's very interesting. Do you remember what happened to you afterwards? Did we stay together?"
"I sulked, drooping my ears, head, and tail at the sight. I ran away, scratched the earth and the bark of a tree, and waited, hiding in a blanket of leaves that fell from above me... I watched noon turn to evening. I cried out to the crisp air and overcast skies, hissing that turning into a cat wasn't supposed to be a curse like this. I didn't want you to be stuck in between half cat, half human... I wanted you to be what you wanted.
"Suddenly, my words filled the air and turned into a rainbow vapor that floated back to where you stood. It engulfed you like a fire before a flash emanated so brightly that it stunned me, and I couldn't see. Once it dissipated, I woke up."
"You don't know what the outcome was?"
"But I do know. What we call "death," the end of physical, bodily existence, is not the final end. There is no such thing. Since you were ever there, you would always be there. I didn't wake up when the dream ended. I woke up when I couldn't feel your touch next to me anymore, but I could look and see that you were still there with me."
"Heracles?"
"Hn?"
Kiku ruffled Heracles's hair and, standing briefly up in front of him, placed a gentle kiss on his forehead. Kiku returned to Heracles side, holding onto his shoulders, Kiku's head leaning into them.
"If one of us leaves before the other, and we reach the day when we are reunited, let us have never been truly separated."