Mao may have enjoyed being a cat for all those years, but being a squirrel had its advantages as well. For one thing, there was the dexterity. The ability to hold and grip things was something one could never fully appreciate unless they had lost it at some point.
So, when the commercials came on during the made-for-TV movie he was watching, Mao found himself excited at the prospect of being able to pick up the remote and actually change the channels.
Click.
"Drill her? I hardly knew 'er!"
Click.
"So, when you think of garbage, think of us!"
Click.
"Intelligence is like the penis bone; it only covers for other faults."
Click.
"From the insanity that brought you 'The Doll who drank too much' and 'The Doll that wanted sex' comes a non-Doll-related feature: 'Lolius Slappius: The Pimp Hand that Kills'!"
Click.
Mao sighed and shook his head. Dolls couldn't behave that way.
But then again, they couldn't cry, either. Or sort-of smile. Or do any of a dozen other things Yin had done. Maybe it was only a matter of time.
"Yin...I...Have to kill her," Hei's lamenting voice and piles of booze bottles entered Mao's mind.
Or maybe it had already happened.
"Yin...What happened to you? Where did Hei take you?"
Hei had said that he would kill Yin. So why didn't he electrocute her when his powers returned? Why did he do...Whatever it was he did? The lack of a body indicated that Yin was alive, but since Hei disappeared as well, there was no way to be sure.
Mao's ears and nose may not have been as sharp as a cat's, but they were more than sensitive enough to detect Oreille's approach long before she reached him.
"Hey, Ricardo!" she greeted loudly from behind him, intending to startle him.
"I told you to stop calling me that," Mao replied with hints of boredom and annoyance. "It's Mao now."
"Hmph, you're no fun," she replied as she sat down next to him on the cream-colored couch. "But, you know, if you're going to name yourself after the form you're taking, then I don't think 'Mao' applies any more either, do you? You're not a cat any more, remember?"
"I'll always be a cat," Mao explained. "Just as I'll always be a man."
"That's not very contractor-like of you, Mao."
"We now return you to 'The man who became a cat'," the television interjected.
The two fell into silence as they watched. The plot was oddly familiar. A man was turned into a cat by a curse, and he runs away from his family. Most of the movie's drama came from the conflicting objectives of the man (who believed his family to be better off without him) and his wife (who was searching for him to bring him home).
Mao's gaze turned to the woman sitting beside him. Their relationship had never been anything more than one of convenience. He had broken it off when he lost his body. So then, why did she save him? How did any of it benefit her? Even if she had loved him, he was certainly of no more use to her in the bedroom (or at least, he hoped not). So why?
"Honey… I can't go back," the man on the television said as the movie reached its climax. "No matter how much I want to. I can't support you and the kids any more. I can't kiss the children good night. I can't even sleep with you anymore! There's just…nothing left I can do to be a part of this family."
Family. That word made Mao think. Not about his biological relatives, of course (those he knew of were long deceased). But it did make him think of the people he had lost. Huang. Hei. Yin. Suou. July. They were the closest thing he ever had to a real family; the type that only the lucky and naïve could believe in. They were the only people who ever treated him as anything more than what he was; the only people who would carry him, or let him sit on their shoulders without reason, or show any sort of affection at all (no matter how dysfunctional it might have been).
But all that was gone now. The only person left who seemed to remember him as a man was the woman sitting beside him now.
"You think I care about any of those things?!" the wife of the main character nearly screeched. "I care about YOU. The children care about YOU. So what if you can't work anymore? I'll get a job! Jacob is already old enough to look after himself, and he's certainly capable of keeping Jimmy out of trouble!"
"Honey…"
"You don't HAVE to do any of those things to be a husband and a father. You just have to BE there. That's all the kids want. And it's all I want. No one could ever ask for anything more."
As the two characters embraced, Mao noticed a pair of blue orbs watching him out of the corner of his eye.
And finally, he understood.
"So, do you think they got it right?" Oreille asked with an expression of amusement as the credits began to roll.
"No," Mao lied. "After all, I'm a squirrel."
The author would like all of his readers to know that he is very sorry for using such shameless references of his other fics as one of the jokes in this chapter. However, the temptation to do so was far too great for him to resist. Once again, the author offers his apologies, even as he asserts that the joke was strictly necessary for comic relief, as is this paragraph.
