Skyline Part 2
JestaAriadne

OK, this now officially dedicated to Norbert for President for being a totally amazing, wonderful and just plain cool person, and providing my one and only review :D

Happy Christmas! As I had no intention of spoiling your Christmas, I *have* updated, so you needn't be depressed about that, although this isn't exactly Christmassy or happy, so just wait keep reading and things get better

Still don't own CATS

Reviews are food for the soul, people! Feed me!!

1. Relative Minor

And I opened my eyes.

One of them, at any rate. The other wasn't too keen to comply. I remember being totally thrown by this, like it was suddenly the most important thing in the world. Which was odd, in retrospect, because you'd really have thought I'd've noticed the soaring pain down my side first. I didn't, not straight away.

But then it hit me and I yowled and yelled and screamed my aching head off like it would do some good.

Heaviside, why did I have to wake up? What was wrong with the grey and the peace and the - the so comfortable end - why couldn't I have just been left at that? There were then huge human faces blotting out my light above me, shouting slow and strange and muddled things that might have made sense at some other time: "Coming round /give her /careful /take it easy girl /alright now /easy?"

Where was I?

White - very clean - lying against something harder than it should have been, like a table - and just screaming in pain - I couldn't see much properly - why couldn't I see?

My paws went flailing at my face, trying to claw away the thick and sickly veil over my eye - nothing was clear - it should have hurt more, I think. I probably almost clawed my own eyes out. It was panic, and literally blind, and I was just trying to see, finding the crazy and crimson fog swallowing me whole...

Then there were suddenly human shouts and human hands holding me down. I struggled, scratched them, scared that they should be so desperately protecting me from myself.

I wasn't going to stop. I wasn't going to stop until I'd scarred their faces and hands and thrown myself to the floor and screamed and screamed and torn myself into a million pieces. But I felt my muscles relax almost before I felt the clean prick of pain in my leg, and proper blackness swirled into me.

~~~

I woke up back at home. Still muzzy.

Something smelt wrong. I felt funny. A lot of me was vaguely tingly, almost intoxicatingly gentle points of feeling down my back.

Had time to observe the carpet was wet and messed up like someone had been scrubbing it clean. Giggled softly at that and at the funny sort of pain, then fell out of the world again.

~~~

The vague feeling in my head was playing gentle havoc with my sense of time too. I'd awake and see sunlight, might not even notice it properly, and have no idea whether it had been an hour or a day or five since I'd last felt the warm. Things fell into the wrong place in little blurry snapshots of the couple minutes I could manage at a time.

I must really have been out of it, because Mungojerrie was just a furry outline against my dreams of waking.

I was gleaning the details of my surroundings so slowly it really frustrated me when I managed to think about it. They'd put me in the good old laundry basket, stored neatly underneath the "occasional table" (stupid name) in the living room. Eating, and attending to "nature's call" (the every day, icky, boring one; don't get excited) caused slight problems. There was my bowl of food, to one side, no problem to reach except that it felt like my spine was melting each time I tried, and actual eating wasn't great. Kitty litter was inconsiderately against the wall some distance away, which was quite an effort to get to when I needed to go. Lotsa blankets for me, though sometimes I wondered if they made any difference. I've never been exactly easy to please, but my temperature was just going crazy. For a while I seemed to be soaring from the north pole to the equator, burning up then freezing into a little quaking icicle.

Mungo was like an anxious guardian angel, always hovering around, though no angel was ever so ill-used and irritated... I think the first words I remember saying were a complaint.

~~~

"Oi'm freezin'..." I moaned.

Mungo put a paw on my shivering back. Don' do that, Mungo... I thought, You'll probably catch something offa me and die... "They saiy you gotta fever," he told me.

"Wot the hell ave Oi gotta fever for?" I croaked. I don't often swear, you know. When I do, you can be sure that I'm either really, really not happy or just not thinking quite straight. In that instance, I think you could take your pick.

"Sumfin abou'... the drugs they're givin' ya. T'stop you urting. Yer body moight not be loikin' em."

"Stop me urting, eh? Go an' tell em it ain't workin..." It struck me soon after that I shouldn't have said that. The pain in his face was more than I could take.

I drifted away again.

~~~

Hardly surprisingly, it was only when I was awake and aware that I would realise how much time I must have been spending asleep or otherwise subdued. I felt like I was missing an awful lot. The human kid came and talked to me a couple of times, petting my fur very carefully, but I couldn't make much sense of whatever it was she was saying between all the "poor kitty"s and "love you"s.

The older humans - that visitor, the vet predominantly - had supplied a few useful words for my considerations in the very brief moments of waking. Concussion. Internal bleeding.

At that point, I was perfectly happy - no, resigned is more like it - to simply pout back up at them, not that they understood: "So my body's messed up? Fix it, then!"

After all, if the humans had control over the whole of my life now, it only stood to reason that they were the ones who'd have to come up with some way of piecing it back together again.

~~~

Spasms of consciousness were getting more frequent with the brief bursts of feeling and memory, and with the even-more-pain. It wasn't so bad as long as I lay perfectly still, but - me? Lie still? I felt that this was quite possibly the cruellest, meanest thing anyone could do to me. I just hated the inability to do anything for myself, and it was gradually coming to me that I'd never really had much of a say in my own life. "Has she had a tetanus jab?" I heard the vet say once. No idea on that one mister, I'd thought. I'm sure I would've had I had the choice, but no one ever told me about em, or let me potter down the surgery and ask for vaccinations against whatever weirdy diseases I might pick up after living rough for years, or on the off-chance some idiot in a car decided to hit me.

I hadn't really even thought much about whoever the guy was in the car that hit me. I suppose it's hardly surprising that my memory of that moment isn't exactly crystal clear. I knew it was a man wearing a red tie - I remembered, because his car was red aswell. Weird, huh? I considered, vaguely, pinning al the blame on him, which I'm pretty sure it what I'd have done a year or so ago. It was what you had to do, to get by. Or at least that's what I'd thought. Hate and hate alike. Great motto. I - well, I hated the idea, and I tried to laugh it off, or just keep out of the way. Still, I did survive, and it was only when I was letting my guard down a bit that this went and happened to me. Was this a punishment? For all those carefree months? For those stolen pearls? My fault? Anyone's?

It seemed too much effort to go blaming anyone. With that thought, I should have known I was doomed. I should have had boundless energy. I should have been boundless energy. I was life and crazy laughter and brilliant light-shows incarnate, and now I'd been reduced to this: immobile and dull-coated supplicant, only going crazy in the privacy of my own head. Perhaps the single worst thing....

Like electricity, and someone had pulled the plug.

It also occurred that I was increasingly lost without Mungojerrie. In my dreams I sometimes thought I heard him scratching against the door of the room, and I told him not to bother, that the humans weren't gonna change their minds anyway. They kept us apart for hours and hours now, in the gentlest way possible; all soft strokes and kind words and explanations that made no sense. They had their reasons I'm sure, but no one ever told me.

And now I was awake enough to mind about it. Maybe I wasn't going to be bothered to go as far as blame, but impatience was coming back to me with a vengeance.

~~~

I thought I heard something about "Thursday". That meant, I guessed, that it had taken me three days since that day to notice my pearls were missing.

And for some reason, that thought just stuck in my head, all day. All while I waited for Mungo, it was "My pearls - where've they gone?" Should have known I was a purely materialistic girl. Shallow, you know? It upset me, in the petty, pretty sort of way all airheads must get upset.

I continued an inspection of my body. Eyes: OK, good enough to see the rest of me. Face: No idea. Didn't feel too bad, actually. Paws: so-so, scratched and bashed up, but alright. No good without the co operation of my back, which was pretty much a complete no-show. There had to be a stronger word than ache. My back screeched when I tried to move it. And half my teeth were broken or knocked out. I had been eating instinctively; the weird sloppy stuff I was given, so at least I didn't have to bother chewing much, which would really have been annoying.

Again, it was the little things that bothered me.

"Mungo!" I yelled at him as soon as he came in. My voice, that was another thing. All wrong. Clogged up and ragged round the edges. Ugh.

"Ey, Teaza," He was having more and more difficulty with that easy smile, I noted.

He loped over the carpet towards me. I wobbled up onto my feet for a few seconds, thought 'Why bother?' and flopped down again. I imagined jumping up to meet him.

"Ow you've been?" he asked, casually, setting himself down next to me.

"Bleaeeeeech." I made a face. "Not bad."

"Eh, that's... good." He scratched an ear.

To put him out of his misery - he never was the best conversationalist - I said: "Where've me pearls gone?"

"....Tha's a point," he said, usefully. "Oi - um, Oi dunno, acsh'lly. Oi suppose... mebbe they put em somewhere after ya -"

"Yeah," I said quickly. Not for my sake, well, at least not entirely. He was suddenly looking so entirely miserable. I imagined giving him a hug. He could do with one.

He scratched his ear again. It was like he'd developed a major case of fleas there or something.

It was so stupid - there were a million things for us to talk about; that was what was always so cool about us, about him - or at least, that was one of the things. He'd listen to my crazy ramblings about whatever and laugh and look at me in that weird wondering way, but never long enough to let me feel uncomfortable, and then he'd come up with some equally wild wonderful idea and we'd always have such a laugh.... He was like my sounding board, and I was always all the better and all the more me for having him around.

And... Heaviside, here we were now, staring at nothing, scuffing the carpet, and not even speaking. If this was what I could expect from consciousness, maybe I'd rather have gone back to drifting, ta very much.

I cleared my throat noisily, which turned out to be a very bad move. I couldn't stop coughing.

I could feel my lungs crunching into a tight little ball.

Mungo whacked me inexpertly on the back.

I stopped coughing.

"Are you OK?" he asked, sounding genuinely panicked.

I nodded, not sure about my voice yet.

"Sure?"

"Yeah, Oi'm jus' peachy, thanks!" I spluttered.

"...OK," he said meekly.

"Nah, sorry..." I managed. "Oi'm OK. Oi prolly jus' gotta cold or sumfin."

"Ya ave?" Voice too sharp.

I reacted almost instinctively. "Yuh-huh... And that's.....bad?" Flippantly, harsher humour. Scared him or something, I think.

"No... Well - yeah... Oi dunno!" I was still looking at him sideways, which puts an interesting slant on a desperate and somewhat scared expression. "Teaz - Oi don' get it! The umans are sayin' all this stuff bout ya... bout yer immune system, wotever tha' is, an' Oi don' understand!" His eyes were worse than his voice this time.

I started to imagine giving him another big hug, but my mouth had shot itself off before I finished. "Wot's there to understand?" I fired back at him. "Oi'm sick is all!" I was yelling. I was yelling at him. "Oi'm sick all over an' -" I giggled, half on the edge of my own hearing. "Hhhhhhhheehhhhhhh!!!" I rasped. "See? See? Ear me breathe!"

Rasping, wheezing, catapulted into another coughing fit, I giggled and giggled even though I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe I couldn't move and -

"B-b-loody funny?" I asked scornfully, even though it was my own giggles that were bursting out of my taut lungs. I didn't know if he replied; I'd almost lost track of my own words. My heart was skittering, beating too fast, I was on the edge- "Ya - th-think it's bloody funny??"

"-Stop it!!"

I stopped. I opened my eyes. His tears were falling onto my face until he blinked and looked away.

Hysterical. I had only been and gone hysterical. I was gasping for breath, as quietly as I could now. What - what happened?

"m sorry. Oi'm sorry... sorry... an...'" And I found I had nothing else to say.

~~~~~

to be continued..

Sorreeeee. It's all depressing I do have vague plans for a happier bit next thing, but v. little of it is written, so yeah, it should be coming sooon.

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