Disclaimer: Bleach is Kubo Tite's work. Borrowing.
Cat Who Watches
October 15 / Night: A Nightmare (Alternate Universe)
21:45
The black cat prowled the alleys, as it had always been written in popular fiction it was wont to, but nowadays it need not only be wary of ferocious guard dogs or speeding death-bringers. Now, shadows had ways of swallowing living things whole, any corner with as much as a blemish of a shadow capable of breeding the monstrous, the grotesque, and the insidious.
Towering buildings, long abandoned and crumbling, hid the worn-faced moon. The dredges of humanity subsisted, naturally, looting through the remains of the metropolis. And the other creatures tolerated them, for their husks were as distasteful as their intentions.
It was through this maze of ghost-infested infrastructures the lumbering creature winged its way. With its sallow, saucer-sized eyes, it spotted the cat and it swooped with a piercing shriek, claws ready to rend flesh, to add another soul to the multitude that comprised the Hollow. The feline yowled with twice as loud a volume, the scratching noise impossibly issuing forth from its sleek frame. Nonetheless, the antediluvian thing trembled and fled, flailing in the skies in its scramble to leave the vicinity.
Satisfied, the cat loped off into the darkness. Certain that it was alone, she returned to the lair she protected. Inside, her human charges slept on. Also with them were the renegade vanguards of the heavens, those who have fallen when the rebellion tore creation asunder. The non-human needed no sleep, but the illusion of rest certainly benefitted them.
The cat would have to awaken them soon. She was sorry to have to do this, but she carefully set aside the misplaced pity as she delicately washed her fur with her tongue. Besides, she had listened to them whimper through their bad dreams long enough.
"Feeling motherly, aren't we?" spoke the man in the hat.
"It happens," the cat replied.
It was almost morning. Of course, morning lasted merely a half an hour. The sun only peered at the world with its burnished forehead. And then it sank back down to the bowels of the earth. Every since Aizen's descent to the above-world, the deposed lord of the skies shunned its former home.
The earth continued to die.
"Wake them," the cat said. "My motherliness ends at listening to them all whine for five minutes more."
Her partner nodded. "You'll still hear them. And don't you always give in? "
"Bah."
The cat went off once more into the endless night.
22:58