There was a certain amount of shouting, to begin with, and Len's incoherent stammering eventually gave way to loud demands to "make sense," until Rin shushed him with a finger to her lips and reminded, "We have to be quiet or we'll attract attention, right?" Len blinked at her, somewhat dumbfounded that of all times his sister had chosen this one to actually pay attention to his lectures, and finally Len subsided, checking the tree-trunk behind him for thorns or insects before finally easing himself against it. Thus propped up, Len looked in silence at the bizarre cat-creature before him, and then back to Rin, his hands finding the pockets of his gray trousers as he did so.
"Rin, why…" Rin looked to Len with a smiling, inquiring face, and the cat-thing that used to be Dinah echoed the movement, and Len managed to finish "… Why aren't you bothered by this?"
"Well, I am," she responded, looking a little confused now herself. "I mean, we're in this huge forest, and we don't know where we are or how to get home, but you told me to…"
"No, I mean about that." And Len pointed an almost accusatory finger at "Dinah," who in turn looked supremely offended at Len's flat monotone. "Our pet cat is some kind of weird half-person now. Isn't that… weird, at least?"
"I'm not a 'weird half-person,'" interjected the creature in question, only to be stopped short by Len's hand, held palm-up facing away from him.
"You don't talk now," said Len, his voice as stern as if he were telling Dinah-the-kitten not to walk on the table-top at dinner. "You shouldn't talk period. I mean it."
"Len!" And Len had to double-take at the reprove in Rin's voice. "Don't talk that way to Dinah!" And as Len tried to figure out just how his twin could still call this weird half-cat, half-human "Dinah" despite ample evidence that "Dinah" was in fact male, Rin reached up and scratched the cat-person lightly behind one pointed ear, as though he were still in fact their family feline.
"Rin! What're you…"
"Human-shaped or not," said Rin, turning her head to look severely at Len, "this is our cute little kitty, and I won't have you yelling at him when he might be able to help us." Rin's tone shifted to the cutesy, babying pitch that she always used with Dinah, as she looked back at the human-form cat and resumed scratching him behind the ear.
"Isn't that right, kitling?" she asked, and "Dinah" responded with a relaxed, throaty purr.
"Exactly right, Mistress," he smiled, nuzzling Rin's neck in a way that made Rin giggle and Len color with anger.
'That damn cat-thing! I don't care if Rin thinks he's still our pet, but he's definitely acting like…'
… Well, like something else entirely. Which was very, very bad, so…
"Len! What's wrong with you?" demanded Rin, shaking free of her brother's grip as Len glared at the cat-person across from him, who regarded him back with that same enigmatic smile. If he was upset about Len having pulled Rin from his cuddling, said cat-person definitely wasn't showing it.
Len, however, wasn't about to explain himself; Rin was notoriously slow to catch on to such things, after all. Instead, never taking his eyes off of the cat-creature, Len straightened his jacket and made sure to keep himself between said cat-thing and Len's beloved (if sometimes oblivious) twin. All Len said was "We don't have time to waste, then… Can you help us get out of the forest?"
"Of course, Master," grinned the Cat, executing a superb mock-bow with a melodramatic flourish, his striped tail whipping the ground behind him as if in emphasis. "But it won't be easy. The forest is large, and…"
The Cat's face was hidden, but Len could have sworn that the Cat's hidden grin grew larger.
"… We aren't the only ones inside it."
Roughly an hour later, Rin was enjoying a brisk walk through the forest, her energy unflagging, and doing her best to ignore Len's irritated one-sided argument with the Cat. This was how Rin had decided to call Dinah, now that she knew for certain that he was in fact a he, and at some point she planned on telling them that... sometime, of course, after the arguing had stopped.
Blowing a puff of air upward so that her blonde bangs fluttered, Rin tilted her head back and let her eyes slide over to Len and the Cat; one of them was looking very close to snapping altogether, one of them was looking as though he was having the time of his life, and there were no prizes for guessing which was which. At last, wrinkling her nose at the monotony of their hour-long trek, Rin cleared her throat and waved a gray-clad arm to catch their attention.
"Hey, you know what? Maybe if you saved your breath, you'd be keeping up. Hmmmmm ~ ?" And Rin grinned in Len's direction, causing her twin – who, it must be admitted, was looking a bit out of breath – scowled and ran a hand through his hair.
"I'm fine! Geez. Anyway, even if I wasn't, which I AM, I wouldn't have to be wasting my breath if this stupid cat-thing just gave me a straight answer!" To punctuate this, Len jerked a thumb in the Cat's direction without bothering to move his eyes from Rin, and the Cat's ears twitched in wordless irritation. However, the Cat himself merely smiled again, pretending to brush dust from the shirt sleeves of his jacket before folding his arms over his chest.
"Straight answers," and the smugness was evident in his voice, "are highly over-rated."
"Look, you…"
"Oh, come on," sighed Rin, toying with a lock of her hair. "Why do boys always have to do this?"
"Do what?" asked Len, prepared to take his turn at being offended. He did not, however, get the chance, as Rin waved the question off with a grin, shaking her head.
"Never mind, never mind… Hey, how about this?" Rin coughed slightly, then flung out her arm so that she was pointing directly at the Cat. Said Cat blinked slitted eyes as Rin began to address him.
"Okay!" Rin seemed determined this time, and Len decided to stand back and see what Rin's "big plan" happened to be. "Cat!"
"Is that what you're going to call him?" was Len's incredulous response, as the Cat himself arched an eyebrow and gestured towards himself with a 'who, me?' manner of moving.
"Yes! After all, that's what he is. And we can't call him Dinah anymore, can we?"
"But he's not the cat," reminded Len skeptically. "He's a cat. I'm sure there are others."
"Well, not now there isn't," was the Cat's cheerful reply, and while Len wondered what that meant Rin was nodding and moving on.
"So, Cat! Where are we?"
"The Forest," was the Cat's prompt reply, and Len felt an already-familiar headache beginning to creep up on him.
"Any forest in particular?"
"No. Just The Forest."
Feeling odd about the way those words were said, Len intervened in the conversation just this once, eyeing the Cat with some suspicion and asking, "Did you just say that with a capital 'T' and 'F'?"
"Why of course," smiled the Cat, looking rather satisfied. "That's how you pronounce all important things, isn't it?"
"And The Forest?" asked Rin, trying to keep the conversation on the rails. "It has an end, right?"
"What a ridiculous question," muttered Len, but the Cat only nodded and pretended he hadn't heard.
"And we're heading towards the end, right?"
"Indeed we are!" beamed the Cat. "And on the shortest route, too."
"So will we reach the end of the forest soon?"
At this the Cat frowned, glanced upwards, and seemed to study the flecks of sky that were visible through the densely-intertwined branches overhead. At last, apparently having evaluated whatever it was that he was evaluating, the Cat shook his head in the negative. "Not before tonight, I'm sorry to say." And then, brightening, he added "But if we keep walking for as long as we can, we'll probably reach The Forest's border before tomorrow's evening falls."
"And you can tell this how?"
"Well, look at it this way…" And the Cat stretched his arms behind his head, grinning widely. "How do you know how to breathe?"
"Uh…"
"Exactly. And in the same way, I know that this forest won't let us go before dark."
"Do you have to say things like that?" shuddered Len, and Rin grinningly pulled on his sleeve with a laugh.
"Don't worry," she said, striking a courageous pose; "Big Sister will protect you!"
"Only by four minutes!" insisted Len, pointedly ignoring the Cat's feline smirk. "And anyway," he coughed, trying not to let himself be needled, "you didn't answer my question from before."
"And what question was that, Master Len?" echoed the Cat, with such perfect innocence that Len really had to resist throttling him.
"Is there anything..." grit Len, from between set teeth, "... in this forest... that can harm us?"
"Oh, that question," grinned the Cat. "No... There's nothing in The Forest that can hurt any one of us."
Somehow, Len didn't feel all that much assured.
Despite the Cat's pessimistic view of time, Rin and Len and their accidental "sidekick" wound up walking for what felt like hours, and slowly it seemed that their surroundings began to change. Although the forest was certainly present, and although the trees themselves continued to be unpleasantly dark and twisted, the forest seemed to be thinning out as they continued to walk along. The spacings between the trees were beginning to grow, and what undergrowth there had been were beginning to soften slightly, becoming more like bending grass and less like ground-level thorns. Rin, eyes looking up, noted that the branches were beginning to pull apart as well; at times she could even see the sky, although it looked like a very odd shade of blue. Maybe it was just because, like the Cat said, things were getting late...
Idly, Rin fished her phone from the pocket of her dress and flipped it opening, glancing at the screen. The numbers that greeted her so startled Rin that she slowed to a stop, causing Len to fall into step beside her and peer worriedly at his sister over her phone.
"Rin... ?" Len was plenty worried on his own, but Rin had been calm for this entire time, and now her face was pale, as though she were finally realizing the impact of their predicament.
Still looking as though she'd seen a ghost, Rin turned her phone around and tapped the phone's narrow screen with a yellow-lacquered nail. "Look at the time!" she said, and her tension was catching, as Len saw the numbers and sucked in a breath.
"Three PM?" Topaz eyes flickered up to the patchwork sky, a dark blue but still filtering murky light through the tree-tops, and then back down to the screen. "It was 2:47 when we made it to the clearing." A beat, and Len was pulling out his own phone even as he suggested, "Maybe your phone got damaged somehow..."
"No dice!" Rin tilted her brother's phone towards her and read the numbers upside-down, the matching beaded straps on the cellphones clashing together like plastic bells from the sudden motion. "Yours is exactly the same... You're saying both our phones broke or something?"
"... Maybe." But Len knew damn well that the odds weren't that good, and he immediately pounced on the Cat with his eyes; the Cat, Len had decided, knew much more about this place than he was saying, and Rin seemed to think the same thing, following Len's glance to what was once their beloved pet. But the Cat didn't seem to notice the pair of golden eyes on his back, as he was idly inspecting a wide patch of grass with the air of a connoisseur.
"Hey... !" started Rin, only to be cut off by Len's grasp on her pointing hand. Rin looked down, to find Len's stare redirected from the Cat to her hand, and when Rin looked down she realized the cause for Len's stare. Across the side of Rin's hand was a buttercup-yellow splash of color, the same shade of yellow as the nail-polish Rin wore, and Rin almost immediately yanked her hand away to study the marking herself.
"What..." Skimming her other hand over the one apparently affected, Rin felt nothing unusual; it was as if she'd received some bizarre tattoo without hew knowledge, the marking less painted-on and more a part of her skin. 'Now things are getting tooweird...' she thought, pushing down a kind of panic as she lifted her eyes to her twin.
Len had no answers; he hadn't had any answers since they'd arrived in this place, and he didn't know what to tell Rin. What was that thing on her hand? If it didn't hurt her, if she hadn't noticed it until now, then it was probably not harmful but...
"What do you think you're doing?!" demanded Len, as the Cat stepped up beside him and plucked up Len's left hand as though it were a newspaper lying on a stoop. Rin echoed that question, although the answer was revealed all too unexpectedly, as the Cat fixed the hands of the twins in a firm embrace, and a matching marking was revealed on Len's hand as well.
Wide-eyed, wondering why they hadn't seen this before, Len and Rin looked down at their joined hands. When their hands were held together in just this way, the marking – which hadn't looked like anything at all – was very clearly a sunshine-yellow heart.
"This is... the playing-card, isn't it?" And Len's voice was a question rather than a statement, because what it was saying was very plainly the truth.
"What's going on here?" asked Rin, and her question now was directed not at Len but at the Cat, who smiled very whitely and gestured to the patch of grass he'd been so carefully inspecting.
"That might take a while, Mistress, and it's getting dark very fast. Maybe we should prepare to camp for the night?" Starting off to what was probably the west, fading into the dripping shadows so that his outline seemed to vanish completely, the Cat's voice drifted back to the standing twins. "I think I saw a fallen tree or two back there that should make a wonderful pair of sofas for we three."
Then there was nothing left to do but wait, and Rin looked back to see Len's eyes waiting for her. Things had become very strange, very quickly, and it seemed very likely that they'd get stranger before they started to make any sense.
Len and Rin did not drop their hands, but held closely, one to the other, as though to stave off the oncoming chill.
There were in fact a pair of fallen trees, conveniently worn free of branches and protruding limbs; they were just light enough to be moved, although they required the efforts of all three "campers" in order to serve as furniture. Before Rin and Len had finished rolling the last log into place, the Cat was crouched over a pile of dry kindling, with dead leaves and dead wood the most plentiful sight in the forest. His back to them, it was impossible to see what exactly the Cat had up his tiger-striped sleeves... but whatever it was, it worked, and soon a red-orange flame was blossoming from the center of the dead-brown bonfire's fuel.
Once the fire was started, it began to grow dark very quickly, as though the night had kindly been waiting for their fire to kindle before falling upon this strange country all at once. Strangely enough, no-one was hungry, but this didn't seem very odd to Rin or Len; probably, all the excitement had just made them too worked up to be properly hungry, although Len was sure that come the next morning, they'd miss their meals soon enough. Despite that, there were no strange noises in the forest; it reminded Rin and Len of the time they'd once run away, and it must have reminded the Cat as well, because he was smiling into the fire when Rin turned to him from her place at Len's side. There were a hundred questions she could have asked just then – about the strange marking, about their strange surroundings, about the nature of the Cat himself – but the one that Rin finally chose happened to be none of these.
"That night," she said. "Seven years ago? Where did you come from?"
"And why were you just a normal cat?" added Len, who was still a little less than sure of the feline, and who was keeping guard at Rin's side.
The Cat smiled a little more widely, his eyes gold in the firelight, and stretched a little; in the flickering light, Len started for a moment as he thought he saw claws sliding from the Cat's hands. Of course, it wasn't that at all – It was just the firelight, making his nails seem like claws, that was all. The Cat finished stretching, then looked across the fire at the human twins.
"I was just there," he said simply, shrugging his shoulders to complement his matter-of-fact tone. "That's all." A pause. "Maybe this forest, where we are now, is connected to that forest, where we found each other. Maybe I was wandering through this forest before I stumbled into the other one."
"That," said Len dismissively, "is not how forests work."
"Oh?" For a moment, Len could have sworn that the Cat's imaginary claws had returned. "Then how do you explain that we're here?"
Len, for a moment, couldn't think of anything; then, he glanced down at the half-heart marking on his hand and held it up into the light. "So you're saying that this, this mark-thing, was given to us by that card, in the place where we found you, the shape-shifting cat-thing, for the sole purpose of getting us from one forest into the other?"
"Why not?" asked the Cat, and Len could only stare.
"Maybe," said Rin, "the key is not to think about it so much."
"So it won't be a problem for you?" joked Len, and mock-flinched as Rin punched him in the shoulder… or not-really-mock-flinched, as Rin was stronger than her petite frame might imply.
"We should've left you in the forest!" pouted Rin, before relaxing once again. "But, you know, maybe we should just not think about this too hard. After all, it'll probably just bring up questions we can't answer; isn't it better to focus on things one step at a time? After we get out, then we can worry about how we got in."
Len mulled this over for several moments, and then reluctantly had to nod in agreement; he still wanted answers, but for now it didn't look as though he'd be getting them. And to be honest, Len would be happy if they just found a quick way out of all these writhing, tangled trees.
"Mistress Rin has a point," said the Cat, and neither of the twins reacted this time to the oddly-placed title. "All things considered, we'd be better off preparing ourselves to make a break for it then staying up all night talking about it."
"Make a break for it?" echoed Rin, her voice colored with a mixture of curiosity and foreboding. "I thought you said there's nothing in this forest that will hurt us."
"Right, nothing," agreed the Cat. "But that's not exactly no-one."
"What's the difference?" asked Len, this time trying to keep the exasperation from his voice, if only for Rin's sake and his own sanity. To Len's utter relief, the Cat only gave another shrug and his smile turned into a non-particular look.
"Well, there's supposed to be a terrifying woman in these woods, and I'm sure that we'll meet her before we get out. That's the way that stories like this go."
"We're in a story now?" Rin laughed, but there was a slightly hesitant note to her laughter that told her twin she wasn't taking the idea as lightly as she seemed.
"Of course, Mistress Rin," smiled the Cat, leaning back against the fallen tree-trunk and shrugging himself into place until he was comfortable. "And you and Master Len are the main characters, so of course you'd have to encounter an evil villain before you reach the end of your quest."
"That makes you the annoying comic relief, right?" And Len had the mild satisfaction of seeing the Cat's scowl aimed in his direction, as Rin did her best to stifle a laugh.
Across the fire, which was now beginning to die away to embers, the Cat appeared to be fast asleep, curled up against the fallen tree-trunk with the shadows dancing over his striped clothing, making him half-disappear. The Cat had said that, as long as Rin and Len held that heart-shaped sigil, none of whatever might wander the forest would bother them… but Len didn't entirely trust this half-cat, half-human, and although he might need his strength for the next day, he was determined to keep watch for as long as he could.
"You know," he said, his voice so low that only Rin could hear him, "I liked that Cat better when he was just Dinah." The only response Len received was the sound of his sister's slow, steady breathing, so despite himself Len only smiled and shifted carefully, making sure that the makeshift blanket was keeping Rin warm. For the rest of the night, and even as the moon began to set into the dawn, Len's golden eyes remained watchful, guarding his sister's sleep.
Author's Notes: I hope this chapter was all right; I've been unlucky in the health department lately. XD; But, no better way to heal than to forge ahead, am I right? (Arch, I'm so late with everything right now!)
Thanks to Sin Piedad, OnigimiRimi, ObsidianEbony and Yoly for reviewing! vocaloidofos, you won't have to watch any of the PVs to get this series… at least, if I'm doing it right! And Damr1990, you don't have to read the original, but I will be using more references from the book than the song or PV had. ^^
Thanks again for reading, and if you liked it, please review!