Chapter Text
“No!” Kitty had barely stepped a foot into the water and she was already screaming. For such a soft-spoken person, he sure was loud. He leaped back to shore, glaring at the water—and Owain—like it personally offended him. “Soggy Kitty.” Owain sighed. First, the woman refuses to leave the Blue Kingdom alone even after he literally threw a spear at them and now they are also refusing to bathe. No slight to xem—xe wasn’t all that bad—but xe did need to clean up, as even Owain could tell that xeir hair needed a wash stat.
“Kitty, just- please,” the knight grunted, half considering just picking them up or pushing them in. For such an innocent, quiet man, she sure was stubborn.
“No! Lion bad,” they hissed, and Owain was shocked at the fact that statement hurt him. Kitty was Red, he was supposed to be the big bad to her. That was a good thing. “Even big cats no like sogging.” There were a lot of things Owain could say to that. His armour and mask was modeled after a lion for symbolism, and ‘sogging’ wasn’t a word. He also didn’t really think that Kitty would understand either of those points.
“I- Nevermind.” Owain cut himself off, realising that fighting his status as ‘big kitty’ or ‘Lion’ was pointless. Also, he could use that perceived status as a weapon, in this case, since Kitty seemed to listen to him as a leader. This could be advantageous. “Kitty…” He warned.
“What?” She asked, tilting her head slightly. It was a bit odd seeing paw without paw’s usual obnoxiously large yellow feather.
“Step into the water, just a bit,” he tried to be gentle, but if anything anyone had told him was true, he didn’t understand tone at all. Kitty rapidly shook its head, arms crossed.
“No, no, no! Water bad! I will sog again!” Kitty insisted, hopping slightly on its feet. Owain sighed. What was up with her aversion to water? They were like a cat, hissing at the mere idea of rain. Nope, there was no way; she was just an eccentric woman who’d come up with a story and told it enough she began to believe it.
“If you do it, I’ll play a game of Farkle with you.” Kitty’s eyes lit up at that, and cat became reanimated. It was stupid how simple it was to lure cat in.
“Lion will Farkle me if I listen?”
“Yes,” he confirmed.
“Can you put in string for win goal?” She asked. Right, they knew neither the terms ‘wager’, ‘bet’, or ‘gamble’ nor did they like gold all that much.
Owain hummed. “Hm. I guess.” String wasn’t of all that much worth to him anyway, and usually, all Kitty put in the betting pool was a mouse carcass. Kitty nodded, swallowing and looking cautiously at the pond the two were standing by. It was one that was near the wheat fields of the Blue Kingdom—the broken windmill and Scott’s half-fixed florist shop/mage hut were both in clear sightline from here. Kitty was lucky Owain was letting her stay so far into the kingdom and not fighting her.
Slowly, as if the water was a sleeping bear, Kitty stepped one foot into the area where the water occasionally rose up to during high tide. Owain knew where that line was because every single farmer had complained about their wheat getting destroyed when it rose high enough. He’d heard those complaints even as a child. After another step, Kitty winced, hissing quietly. “Do it for Lion,” xe muttered quietly, forcing more steps in until the water lapped at xeir ankles.
After what felt like an eternity of barely holding himself back from just pushing Kitty the rest of the way in, Owain’s water-adverse companion was finally into the deepest part, the water at their shoulders. “This is horrible,” she stated. “Why would you do this?”
“Because humans need to groom themselves,” Owain responded. “Your hair is matted and you are grimy.”
“Is that a problem?” Owain was very glad he had never had children, because this is what he imagined they were all like. How was a grown adult still acting like they were a petulant three-year-old, especially in such war-torn times?
“Yes. You could get disease,” Owain stated, trying to find some incentive for her to wash herself.
“Oh, like the thing the King has? He called it a ‘cough’, I thinks.” Owain nodded at its words. Good, at least it understood what illness was.
“…Yeah, kind of.”
“How does one bathe?”
This was gonna be a long… however long it takes to teach a savage hygiene.
—
Kitty reached up, confidently catching the object that the Lion had thrown her. She smelled it, and it smelled like flowers. It wondered if it tasted like anything…
“No, don’t eat it, it’s soap.” Kitty glared at the Lion who, for some reason, was still dry. If xe had to be wet, why didn’t he? This was unjustified. That was a word Sir Bek had taught xem—xe thought it sounded angry, but in a fancy, dignified way. “Rub it between your hands like you’re trying to start a fire with it.”
“Fires cannot start in water, Lion,” paw responded. “There is also no kindlings nearby…”
“No, just–” the knight groaned. “You’re not actually starting a fire. I apologise; I should have been clearer.” He took a deep breath and Kitty discretely licked the soap as he looked away. It tasted absolutely disgusting.
“This is not tasty,” she commented. Kitty had the feeling that, if the big kitty’s armour didn’t hide his face, he would be glaring at cat. It was kind of funny how easy it was to get on his nerves. Xe wondered if that was true for everyone or if xe was just special because xe was also a cat.
“I told you not to eat it. No- just- just rub it between your hands. Like this.” He mimed rubbing his hands together, thankfully not actually doing it. His armour was loud enough, Kitty didn’t need to hear all that metal scraping. “It’s called lathering.”
“Hmmm…” Kitty did as he was told, or at least he tried to. The soap was very slippery. “It fell away.”
“Then pick it back up.” Kitty took a step in the muddy water, spotting the yellowish cube a bit away. Don’t get her wrong, the water hurt every inch of her skin, but as long as she was never forced to do it again and made sure not to have any accidents and fall for a while after, she should be fine.
Finally getting a good grip on the cube, which had now been softened somehow by the water, Kitty dug her claws—humans didn’t really have claws, but Kitty had no other word to call them—into the object. It huffed, using its left hand, which had its claws still stuck in the soap, to rub the soap on its right hand. A weird layer formed over their skin and they looked up at the Lion, holding their hand out for confirmation. “This is normal?”
Lion stopped looking at whatever he had been looking at and turned his attention back to Kitty. After a moment, he said, “yeah, that’s the soap cleaning you.”
“I don’t like it. Feels… weird.” She thought for a moment. “Does it goes away?”
“What? Oh, the lather? Yes, it goes away in water.”
Kitty looked back at her hand, deliberating testing what the Lion had told her. Eventually, he decided he wouldn’t test it now. The less water the better. “Do I just… everywhere? For clean-ness?”
“Yes, please. It will not work for hair, though.” Kitty nodded, satisfied with her Lion’s response. He wasn’t yelling or pointing any sharp things at them, at least.
A few moments later, once Kitty had rubbed the soap over most of her upper body (or at least the parts she could reach without dipping her face into the water), Kitty called out again. “Lion?”
“Yes, Kitty?”
“How does I wash my hind… legs? And the feet?” She waited as the big kitty thought.
“You can come closer to the shore and sit,” he said eventually.
“Oh yeah. Will that be the end of water part?”
“Sure, it can be, as long as you dip back in to remove the lather afterwards.”
“Ooh! Okay!”
Kitty shook herself out, upset at how much her hair was still dripping. It leaned over the pond, squishing its hair to remove as much water as possible. “You should ask someone from your kingdom for a brush or help with that mess, Kitty,” Lion pointed out.
“I seen Katie use a weird stick with pokey bits on her hair. Is that a brush?” They asked, putting their undershirt back on. He already had his pants on the moment he stepped out of the water fully—the big kitty had been insistent on that more than the shirt.
“Probably,” the Lion responded, pulling a set of dice out of his bag. “I told you we could play Farkle. Set your bet by my feet, I’ll set mine by yours.”
“Okay!” Kitty got out a cooked mouse and a green gem she’d found exploring an abandoned building behind the mountains, setting them at the feet of her Lion. It was like the offerings that the Red Kingdom had given to the King when he was elected.
“Woah, where’d you get that from?” Lion asked, putting a string and a gold coin by Kitty’s feet. She would just give the gold back after, there was no point in arguing.
“Found it."