The black cat, actually a dark grey if you looked at it closely in the sun, had a favourite spot on the wall of a cafe in Lacour. She appeared there at precisely the same times each day, when the cafe opened, when it was busiest and when it closed. She knew when there would be more clientele than usual, and therefore more people around who would feed her if she mewed and purred and stared up at people with big eyes and wrapped herself around their legs. She knew when the regular customers arrived, who always left aside treats for her. She knew which of the staff could be persuaded to feed her and which would shove her away with a broom. At night, after the cafe closed, she knew when she could raid the bins unnoticed. Leon had found out that she was the pet of the family who owned the cafe but she mostly lived outside. While she was friendly around people, she didn't like staying too long and wasn't very domestic. In a way, she sort of reminded Noel of Ashton, so until he had found out her name, he called her Ash. It was a good gender-neutral name for an animal he couldn't reliably identify the sex of yet. Cats were commonplace on Expel but he hadn't been on the planet for all that long, and he certainly didn't want to offend any animals by misgendering them. Besides, the colour of her fur reminded him of ashes.
The ashes of a burning world, drifting away, evaporating into the void...
A soft-furred face brushed against the back of his hand and butted him insistently until he opened his clenched fist. The cat purred and rubbed herself against the palm of his hand, as if to demonstrate how to stroke her and demand to know why he was failing so utterly at the task after she had already instructed him time after time. He hadn't realised that he had started spacing out again, or that his muscles were so tense. The cat must have seen how stressed out his body language was. She didn't like any hassle from people in her territory, it ruined the whole atmosphere of the place and stressed her out too, so she usually dealt with it straight away.
"I'm okay now," he told her, and ran a hand down her silky fur, causing her to purr even faster in approval. He watched her walk around and around him, unable to keep still, not sure what to do with his attention now that she had it. Then she stopped and stared pointedly up at his plate, then over at him, meowing a complaint.
"Oh, sure, I've got something left over for you," he said, taking the fish out of his sandwich, putting it on the saucer of his cup and putting the saucer on the ground for her. She nudged it out of his hand before he had properly placed it on the ground, almost knocking it over, then pulled the fish off the saucer and ate it on the floor. It disappeared rather quickly. He laughed at the contrary way she seemed to do everything. He knew she wasn't trying to be ungrateful. Besides, he was probably the weirder of the two, buying food that he didn't particularly want, just to feed another animal and encourage it to approach him. He wasn't the sort of animal lover who was a vegetarian - it felt hypocritical, as most of his favourite animals ate other animals, and would probably eat him if their situations were different - but he wasn't particularly hungry. He also hadn't found work yet, but he still preferred spending his remaining money eating at the cafe, so that he felt a little less lonely. Anyway, by now, the cat would complain if he didn't turn up. He was enough of a regular that she expected him to be there. Nobody else spoke to him, despite his friendly, sad-looking face, but he didn't really encourage them to, and he was content that they left him to eat in peace without questioning his unusual appearance. He was just another customer, and it wasn't as though random strange-looking visitors were particularly rare these days.
As he became part of the scenery in Lacour, and in the other towns he visited in his efforts to keep in contact with his friends, he started to have the flashbacks less. Gradually, everyday things started to remind him less of the fact that he was stuck permanently on an alien world after his own world was destroyed. There had been a time when he thought the nightmares had gone for good, but then they had come back as the initial shock and the sensation of unreality that came with it faded away and the entire magnitude of the situation had hit him at once. Those had been particularly bad times.
Come to think of it, it had been the cat who brought him out of it, back then. He had been window-shopping for nothing in particular, peering in at the food, the weapons and armour and the everyday supplies, musing that they weren't really all that different from the sort of things people used in Nede. Then he had found himself thinking of uses for the weapons, and for certain combinations of the herbs and medicine. Maybe a little mandrake in his tea. He hadn't even broken stride in his train of thought, watching himself from the outside with the same clinical detachment as ever.
Then the cat hissed at him and scratched him on the leg. He had been worried he had stood on her tail or accidentally kicked her, so he immediately bent down to apologise. She glared at him in fury, as though berating him for being an idiot. She wouldn't stop following him until he stopped spacing out and did something useful.
Afterwards, he had gone straight to find Chisato and talk to her.