Chapter Text
‘His name is Pib.’
They’ve been walking for near three hours now, and the woods have gotten thick and unwelcome. Branches snatch at Ylfa’s hood, and Timothy is half distracted by Pinnochio stumbling over roots that seem determined to drag him into the dirt with them. The sky is gone now, or what is there is completely dark, a murky inky blackness that seeps between the leaves and drips like sap down the tree trunks.
It's in a new clearing, a circle of sticks and leaves crushed around them and Gerard’s hair slowly being filled with sticky weed courtesy of their youngest, that Pinnochio stops and says it.
‘Pib?’ Rosamund echoes. ‘Who’s Pib?’
‘The cat.’ Pinnochio groans. ‘The one that took me to your house. He’s called Pib.’
‘What’s it stand for?’ Ylfa sniffs.
Pinnochio gives her a funny look. ‘Nothing? Why would it stand for anything.’
‘Well,’ Ylfa defends, and then says nothing more, because what could it stand for really.
There’s an echo-y quiet, and the woods seem awfully silent around them. Something crawls up the tree trunks, slithering and dark like flitting words curled around the bark. Wind rustles in their ears like the distant page turns of some book.
Gerard, whose been holding his sword half like a shield for the past ten minutes and seems no more likely to hold it properly now, clears his throat and asks, not unkindly, ‘You had a cat?’
Pinnochio stopped fully, and the rest of them startled when he cupped his mouth and yelled, ‘The black cat! PIB! PIB!’
‘I thought he was a toy?’ Gerard whispers, and it’s flooded suddenly by Pinnochio, sharply turning to him and screeching ‘NO HE’S CALLED PIB. PIB!’ He redirects his yelling from their group to up in the canopy, and the shrill screams begin to move from an understandable word to a noise surely only dogs would be able to see.
Ylfa startles so hard she falls into the leaf pile beside them, and Rosamund makes a strange, distressed yodelling noise in surprise. Timothy, for all his years of wisdom, has to remind himself that strange situations elicit strange reactions from children, and that no harm is done by the yelling. They are disturbing nothing but themselves in this empty woods it seems.
And yet a chill rise across his shoulders and he can’t stop his eyes darting into the inky darkness above. Pinnochio’s yelling begins to taper off, and the sound to him and Ylfa scuffling with each other behind him fills the forest instead. It’s lower, lingering on the canopy, and a single black feather drops from it.
Pinnochio falls very suddenly silent.
The feather takes too long to fall, and sways side to side. The wind seems to have no effect on it, and instead curls around Timothy’s ears and whispers.
Once upon a time it murmurs, and the feather drops like a weight.
Gerard rushes to catch it, but it falls cleanly into Timothy’s outstretched palms. He hadn’t realised he’d held them out at all, but the feather falls heavy and dark into them. It fills the lines in his hands, the age that withers them with tiny flittering tributaries, and the voice on the wind, for it can only be a voice cruel as it is, crows, a little black cat ripped apart the universe.
The feather dissolve, drips down his arm like ink and stain his shirt a cold dark black. The wind is ripping through the trees now, and there’s hands on Timothy’s shoulders, pulling him back, back out the clearing. The children are yelling, screaming at him to run. But all he can see is a little black cat with a cocky little smile and daggers tucked into his boots. It’s there for a moment, among the tree trunk, and slinks away as the ink overcomes it.
The wind catches up to them. And do you know what I did to that little black cat?
Gerard finally yanks Timothy fully back around, wide eyes yellow and bright in the dark, and there’s a greenish tinge to his face that doesn’t seem to be from sickness. He’s running in long strides, and beyond him Rosamund is pleading the shrubbery to let them pass, with some success.
‘What the fuck.’ Pinnochio is screaming, why is he still screaming. ‘What the fuck what the fuck.’
Ylfa swings her axe at a wayward tree root, that shudders away from her like it had been burnt, and the wind howls around it. ‘What did you do?’
Pinnochio doesn’t get the chance to reply, because a bird, large and black and screeching, dives him from above, and grasps his suspender strap. Pinnochio chokes on his own yell. He kicks out at the thing, arms scrabbling for hold. Gold flickers at his finger tips, tiny cats cradles spitting into life but they fade just as soon as they come and Pinnochio is yanked higher and higher.
Timothy barely has a moment to think, to process what the actual fuck is happening, when the bird drops and disappears into the surround ink (and why does he know it’s ink) as Ylfa’s hand, large and oversized and fluffy, grasps and pulls him back. They tumble into each other, with barely a moment to breathe before Gerard is urging them back up.
The wind picks up, winds its way in and up Timothy’s shirt and picks at the hairs on his arms. They stand on end, and quiver as the cold seeps deep into his bones and his old beating heart stutters at its words. I consumed him.
‘Stop!’ Timothy roars. It tears out of his throat, tears up his spine and twists his tongue. It comes out guttural and pleading and angry. So so angry.
The forest stops. The children stop. The wind stops. The darkness around them falls, and the high croaking of crows buzzes around them. The trees are dead in this part of the forest, wilting and sodden with mould. Fog drapes where the ink has snuck away, and dark shapes of distant branches feels all to close. His breath puffs out visibly, and the shirt he left the house in feels too little protection against the thing that chases them.
In the corner of his eye he can see Pinnochio tense, sees Rosalind and Gerlad ready a battle stance he doesn’t think they knew. Ylfa is crouched so low she looks as if she’s on all fours, and there’s a feral wideness to her eyes that any other person may fear.
‘You give him back.’ He says next and the crows quiet. ‘You give back our cat.’
He’s no one’s cat. He does not like the be owned.
Timothy licks his lips, chapped from the beating storm that just passed. There’s something wrapped around his heart, coiled in his lungs and it feels like its pulsing in time. It’s wanting. ‘He isn’t owned.’ He says, oh so carefully. This is a game of words, he knows. This is a game he can win. He was so close last time. (why can’t he remember last time.)
The wind sidles up to him, and it is alive now certainly. It’s a figure, the kind that laps up his life and stares into his soul. It crowds his shoulders, wraps around the children behind him and the shuffle all closer. The crows have settled now, peering down with wide empty eyes from the branches above them. There’s a mass of them though far above them all, still fluttering and frantic. A feeding frenzy he imagines, and then stops.
His imagination has never been safe.
He does not like the be owned. It drawls. But he’s such a bad little kitty. I simply had to keep him.You held him close, dear boy. You nearly broke him.
Pinnochio huffs as if Ylfa has stolen his slippers again, but it sounds wet and hurt.
Timothy thinks of the storm, of the wet steps and the vacant look and the way Pinnochio demanded they believe him. That the Cat was real, fluffy and grumpy and wrapped around his neck like some wriggling scarf.
He thinks of far distant memories, of a little black blob at the end of his sleeping mat, of snarky little comments in his ear in the dark, of pattering feet and sharp knives and a creature with a hundred lives shoved into it and yet still living new ones.
He thinks of mauled fur soft under his hand, of rumbling purrs on his chest, and he thinks that Pib is not a creature to be owned, but a creature to be loved.
Henry will scold him for this later, tending to their newest houseguest, and he will look teary eyed and upset, but Timothy was never known for his clever in the moment decisions.
The mass of feathers and beaks above them squawkes with thousands of bird calls when Timtohy’s basket, complete with book and ink bottle, rams right into the centre. They scatter, and his basket tumbles to the forest floor, followed with some attempted grace by a tiny twitching black creature.
It lands, unmoving in the basket top and all hell breaks loose.
Rosamund makes the first move, and her arrow pierces a hulking abomination of a bird that leers down at them. It roars as it goes down, an unnatural cacophony of a hundreds voices pleading to let go. It leaves a stain on the bark as it melts away, and Rosamund stares at it in horror as the glistening glass hand of some creature surfaces briefly in the muck. It’s pulled back under in the blink of an eye, and then Ylfa is upon it.
‘It’s past our bedtime!’ She yells at them, and there’s a growl hidden underneath.
Timothy is reminded crudely of that first meeting of the little girl on the end of the road with a mouthful of teeth and a handful of blood and eyes so wide and sweet that cried into his shoulder. He is not scared of her, not as she tears into the feathers with a feral determination. Pride swells in his chest, clambers up his throat and is only breathed out in a huffing breath as the golden threads tangle din Pinocchio’s fingertips finally loosen and grapple the crow descending onto Ylfa’s unprotected back.
Such brave little children. The wind cackles. Such stupid little creatures.
‘Get stuffed you old cow.’ Pinnochio screams. It’s not the worst thing he’s ever said, and still there’s an urge in Timothy to pull him back, away from the voice on the wind and safely into his arms.
Rosamund is aiming her bow again, and Gerard is fumbling through his sword plays and suddenly the only thing Timothy can see is his book basket, and the black lump inside.
His knees take the brunt of his mad dash to the basket, and it’s a damn miracle he gets near it at all. He crashes into the dry moss, hands already wrapping around the scraggly body before him. The creature, cat, Pib is breathing quick shallow breaths, and his tail is twitchy and nervous. The dark fur is clumped and hot to touch, and there’s bright bits of skin visible in between Timothy’s shaking fingers. Whiskers are missing, and an ear has been clipped.
But amongst the din, with the wind pulling at his fur and Timothy’s own delicate hold grating still on the bloody patches, Puss in Boots gazes up at him with bright slitted eyes and croaks out, ‘I hope you haven’t put away my milk dish.’
He talks out loud, mouth shaping the words around bloody fangs. Cat don’t talk. Of course they don’t. Pib was never a cat though Timothy reasons, remembering second lives and wolf teeth daggers and nights hearing fox fights on the camp borders. Of course he wasn’t.
Timothy laughs. He laughs and cries just a little, and laughs. ‘It’s been on the side all week.’
‘Well, it will be gone off now.’ Pib grumbles, curling small into his crossed arms and settling a head soft on his shoulder. He does not go quiet, cannot with the rattling in his lungs, but he goes suddenly very limp.
Timothy panics. The light is going in and out as the wind and ink battle for dominance, and he sees as Pib’s eyes lose focus on the world around him. In a second there’s words on Timothy’s tongue, foreign and new but oh so old. They take shape like he knows them, and the air shimmers from his wrists and up around his newest companion. The tiny shaking body stills, and the bleeding ear is suddenly scabbed and raw with scar tissue.
‘Oh.’ Pib breathes, ‘it’s you.’
‘It’s me.’ Timothy agrees. He has no idea who that is but he beginning to get the picture.
There’s a paw under his chin, mangy and scrubbed raw from fighting and the claws are ragged and sharp on his exposed neck, but Timothy has never felt something so right. He cries again and laughs louder still until the wind has gone silent and the sky is dark with clouds and rain and no creature of ink and parchment. Beyond him, Ylfa is a hulking shadow, her axe dual wielded and black with blood, and Gerard breathes heavy and complains of delicate skin and sweating brows.
Pinnochio screams. Pib winces, but he’s scrabbling at Timothy’s shoulder. Seems half way between running away and running towards and ends up in a quivering indecisive stand off with the boy. Which he promptly loses, as his indecision leads to a surprise attack from Rosamund, who sweeps the black cat of his feet and scratches softly right behind his ear.
‘It’s been so long.’ She bemoans. ‘You’ve taken so long to get here.’
‘I have not.’ Pib announces, and he’s all proud of himself but it’s altogether sad and thankful and lost. ‘I was here the whole time.’
Ylfa pounces next, and Timothy half fears for a moment they’ll scare the creature away. He remembers Pib’s diverted love of attention, waging war with his own trickster nature.
Trickster. What a funny thing to call him.
They do not leave the forest for another afternoon, and the sun has well set by the time Timothy is herding the lot of them up the path to his house on the edge of the woods. Henry stands with the lantern in the doorway, and there’s a dead crow laid dreadfully at his feet. He welcomes them in, fusses over the tears in Ylfa’s cloak and the mud all up Gerard’s shirt sleeve and the ink stains on Rosamund and Pinnochio’s rumbled clothes.
Timothy is urged into an armchair, and the group sprawl at his feet like children in a nursery. Henry makes the tea in the other room, and the cat, the trickster, Pib curls warm by the fire.
And that next morning, when they wake with cricks in their necks and soot on their knees and all sorts of sticky weed still plastered on their clothes, Pib is prowling along the banister with a look of trouble on his battered face, and a pair of soft leather boots firmly on his hind legs. He’s stumbling over injured legs, and he gets his face shamefully stuck in a jar without his whiskers but Timothy sees the sharp wit laying just behind inhuman eyes, and reminds himself that this is a cat that tried to kill a god.
Timothy sees then, his family full and free and wonders if maybe this is the beginning he never thought he wanted.