Title: ploffskin, pluffskin

Characters: The Cat King, mostly. Featuring a creative* cameo! (*creativity not guaranteed)

Notes: Who out there wanted to read an entire fic featuring the Cat King as the main character? Come on, raise your hands, don't be shy! ...Oh, yeah, it's probably just me. Also have I mentioned before how much I love surreal settings and the 'go scope out the eldritch location' plot? This isn't quite that, but it's close.

Aside from that, there's all sorts of weird influences going into this soup pot of self-indulgence :v See if you can spot them all, they're like Pokemon

Also my favorite ship feels very blatant and not at all as ambiguous as I usually prefer to write it in this fic, so u know. There's some old people (cats?) loving. But it's PG-rated at the very most

"I think Nataki is a good name for you."

"I have a perfectly good name already, Sire."

"Nah, babe, see, I know a cat named Natori. And you're not a cat. I can't go calling the both of you 'Natori.' It'd be weird. And confusing."

A resigned sigh. "...You and I both know that's not true, as you quite often refer to him as 'Natty', but I suppose there's little I can do to stop you."

"Nataki, it is, then."

"Yes."

Out across a charcoal-colored field, there is a dirt path, and on that dirt path is what appears to be a cat with a purple-grey coat of long, slightly matted fur, walking along the road with a nonchalance that speaks to a definite familiarity (or at least comfort) with the surroundings he's found himself in. In his paws, he carries a human's duster, torn strips of faded, blue silk adorning the topmost end of it.

The pink sky above him hums when he looks up into it, long, twisting tree roots unfurling along it like particularly spindly cirrus clouds. The Cat King's steps slow.

"...Nataki, where am I going?"

"Wherever you want to go, Sire." Nataki sounds tired.

Claudius thinks to himself for a long minute, stopping to look out at the sky again, and then to the horizon, shrouded in a fringe so black it gives the appearance that he's become trapped in a vast snowglobe. He wonders if he will eventually come to a clean drop if he walks far enough.

"Well," he starts bluntly. "I want to go home, babe."

"Then go home."

Claudius glowers. He huffs, also, for good measure. "You're not very helpful, Nataki."

"Mm, yes, I imagine Natori would be much more helpful to you, Sire. It's a shame."

And the sass, too! He does not deserve this. He shakes the duster in his hands vengefully, just to blow off some steam, but Nataki gives no reaction to the action and the strips of fabric tied to the end of the stick only swish back and forth harmlessly. It's not at all very satisfying, so he instead throws the thing as hard as he can and then aggressively crosses his arms. With a pout.

Eventually, when he can no longer tell how much time has passed, he hears Natori's voice again, this time with an odd crackle running through it, as if his words are being played through an old phonograph, or one of the other cat's favorite records.

"Do you feel better now, Sire..?"

Claudius deflates, something he allows himself only because he is utterly alone, and his only companion otherwise has neglected to give himself eyes. He pads over to where poor Nataki lies forlornly on the ground and picks him back up again, brushing the dirt off his stem and fabric.

"Yeah. I guess so." Then, sheepishly but quiet, "...I'm sorry I threw you."

"It's alright, Sire." Soft, gentle. A near croon, like a passive mother reassuring her misbehaving child, and the king feels suddenly quite violently lonesome. He grips the duster more tightly than before, feels how uncomfortably brittle the bone is in his paw, and curls over it, staring numbly down at the dirt under his feet.

"I still want to go home, Nataki."

"Keep walking. You're bound to come across it at some point."

The king finds he can't quite argue with that logic, so he heaves a sigh and starts back down the dirt path. In the sky, he watches as the puffy golden fingers fall from the heavens and land in the distance with a sound not unlike that of someone pulling the plug on a massive, rickety piece of machinery— their wispy tails then follow after them, coming down with the speed of an enormous Daddy Long Legs spider, where they benignly curl in his path and around him. Almost too well. He feels like a highlighted word in a textbook.

"...Nataki, if I was on a dart board, would I be a big target?"

"It's not a dart board, Sire." The crackle is gone.

"You didn't answer the question."

"Because it's not a dart board."

"Hmmm…"

"Sire, you're never going to make it home before dark if you keep taking these senseless detours. Please."

Ah. Perhaps Nataki doesn't make a half-bad Natori— his ability to redirect the king's attention remains intact. Claudius starts forward again, hopping on to the shortest Sky Wall that had settled before him and then sliding down the other side.

"Nobody said anything about 'home before dark', babe. There's still plenty of time."

Nataki doesn't answer, but the king can still feel the unease radiating from him. Or perhaps imagines it. It's unequivocally what Natori would have done upon being corrected in such a way, but Nataki is a duster, after all.

"I've got time," he repeats more firmly this time, trying to effect a response from his companion.

"Y… yes, Sire." The lukewarm answer he'd been waiting for, and the familiarity soothes him.

A time eventually arrives that sees the two of them come to a deep ravine, cracked into the middle of the path as if an enormous being had dropped a celestial bowling ball on to the earth itself. The king peers down into the resulting gorge, spying a tiny, white house settled among all the reeds and nestled into a gap between two shiny, black cliff walls. He thinks he hears ocean waves, even though there isn't so much as a trickling creek at the bottom of the gorge.

"You should jump down there," Nataki advises abruptly.

"Ha! Well, now I know you're not Natori, because your advice needs some work. Cats can't fly, babe. Guess you'd know that if you were one."

"Dusters don't fly, either."

"They don't splatter all over the ground, either," Claudius mutters distractedly under his breath, pacing back and forth over a foot-long stretch of the jagged cliffside. The shack below piques his curiosity, a predicament that has always led him to trouble and probably always will.

Were he human, clambering down the side of these cliffs likely would have been quite the ordeal, but being instead the magnificent, stealthy creature known colloquially as The Cat, the climb is a cinch. At least. That's how he's choosing to look at it.

Nataki has remained reticent throughout the descent, but somewhere in his ear Claudius would swear by the sound of Natori's sleeping breaths, and, when his mind wanders, he will think to himself that there's no reason he should know that noise as intimately as he feels he does.

The 'shack' in the ravine is tremendously larger up close than from afar. In fact, it's the castle he's called home for some time now.

"Now, how in the world did this get here, babe..?" The Cat King muses, paws on his hips. In one of those paws, Nataki speaks up.

"It's simple, Sire— the sour grapes."

The king, expecting one of Natori's reasonable explanations and receiving this nonsensical one instead (albeit still in his advisor's usual patient tone), stares blankly up at the castle for a few more seconds before whipping his gaze to the duster in his hands instead.

"What?!" He barks. "How could grapes have anything to do with this?"

Nataki once again doesn't answer. The king growls lowly in frustration, but he remembers how he felt the last time he threw Natori, and stays his hand.

"...You go quiet at the worst of times, Natori," he grumbles instead.

He doesn't know how long he lingers in front of the castle. That it's surrounded not by sunny, grassy hills and tiny sod houses which haphazardly dot the landscape but instead by large, cracked and glossy cliff sides gives the palace an oddly unfamiliar, sinister look. He isn't sure he wants to see the inside.

In the end, however, his ever-present curiosity gets the best of him once more.

The inside of the castle is empty and still, much as he'd expected it to be. But there's something else about it that tugs at some half-buried memories of his. It's not until he stubs his toe on a particular end table on his way through the entrance hall that he finally realizes just what that vague thing is.

"What the— this is the castle from when I was a kitten."

"Yes."

The king clicks his tongue. "Now you speak up again."

"It's getting dark, Sire."

The king looks to the surrounding walls that are open to the outside, and the glass-less windows, and he does discern that the amount of pink-tinged sunlight streaming in through them is notably diminished. The castle itself is dimmer than he remembers ever seeing it, each room he pops his head into dingy and shrouded in dusky shadows.

"It'll be fine," he says offhandedly.

Before he knows it, he stands before the ornate doors that lead to his mother's old bedroom. His own childhood bedroom is just down the hall; when he turns to look, he can see the muted jade green color that had languished all about the castle during his parents' reign. An evergreen favorite of his mother's. The king hesitates for a long time, even after laying one of his paws on the door's handle, and finally just speaks his worries aloud.

"Nataki, where do I want to go?"

Natori's voice is laden with static again. Claudius finds it a little grating.

"I'm sorry, Sire. I don't know that."

It's been a long time since either of his parents passed away. He should at least take a cursory look around his mother's old bedroom. It can't hurt. It's been so long. He wants to see it again.

...Doesn't he? He is the cat which curiosity keeps killing.

In the end, he turns from the pair of doors and wanders down the hall to his own in a mechanical haze. It's only when he's opened that door, stepped into the bedroom, and closed the same door behind him that he asks another question to his duster.

"Natori, am I weak?"

In his mind's eye, he can see the real Natori scramble to reassure him upon also being asked this particular question, a well-meaning but potentially empty lie to spare his feelings. Natori is a good liar. Yet just as vividly, he sees also the bespectacled cat breathe in sharply, recoil in alarm like a wounded animal, and can't decide which seems more in character. Natori is a kind liar.

Nataki seems to take an incomprehensible third option. "The walls are breathing."

The Cat King blinks, dumbfounded, but in the relative silence finds he must agree. They flicker, as well, like a glitching computer monitor.

"You know, when I was king, the walls didn't breathe or disappear," he says haughtily. Then, more thoughtfully as he looks out at the room he barely remembers from childhood, "Hope Lune doesn't bring that back..."

His childhood bedroom is spacious and busily-decorated with the kingdom's signature fish iconography, if also with particularly childish designs and imagery. Claudius doesn't necessarily remember his decorations being so cutesy, but he can't find it in him to be suspicious of them all the same. The window beside the bed is dark, with only the occasional flash of what he assumes to be a group of fireflies to light it, and he feels rather strongly that he would like to avoid it. A great many shelves line the wall directly before him, built into the architecture, and scattered about them lie countless miniatures and figurines. The king pads to them first without deliberating the decision.

Nataki, meanwhile, seems to take this as an opportunity to recite a story.

"Once, as a very young child, you felt profoundly ignored by your mother and father and your other caretakers, and so you ran away. To the best of your abilities, that is. You sequestered yourself away in a part of the castle that was once being renovated, but at the time lay abandoned and unfinished halfway through the project."

The king doesn't respond to agree or deny the story, nonchalantly surveying the collection of dusty trinkets and toys lining forgotten shelves. There's a trio of tiny pig figurines which had been carved from tiger's eye lying on their sides, and he supposes it's only fitting his gaze should have been drawn to them in this moment.

"You stayed there all day, but no one ever did come searching for you. You went back to your room with some of the unwanted baubles you'd found during your harmless, sad rebellion and never spoke of it again."

Here Claudius finally speaks up.

"Nah, babe, I told Natori about it a long time ago. Wonder if he still remembers it."

"I do. I just relayed it to you, faithful as the day you regaled me with it."

Claudius doesn't feel like arguing. Instead, he runs one of his paws along the edge of a shelf, tsking at the thick layer of dust it's become a home to. It's too bad he's been gone so long.

"I should use you to wipe off some of these dusty shelves," he says in a drawl, a lazy jest tossed out in order to allay some of the silence.

"I wouldn't resist. It's what I was made for," Nataki responds demurely, and something in Claudius recoils.

Logically, he knows it's true— Nataki is a dust rag on a stick. But said dust rag on a stick has Natori's voice.

"Don't say that, babe. I'll put a crown on you."

Natori laughs, and says something about declining his marriage offer, but the king thinks to himself that it's been a distinctly long time since he last heard his advisor genuinely laugh for him. Natori is a kind liar, if one such thing exists. The gnawing loneliness from earlier returns. This isn't right. Where even is he right now? How long has he been here..? He's besieged suddenly by a swell of dizziness. The miniature stone pigs on the shelf before him pick themselves up and then instantly melt into coins.

"...I miss you," he unwittingly admits also in the chaos.

"I'm right here, Sire."

"I know." He doesn't know what else to say, never mind how to say it. He briefly thinks of asking Natari any of his questions, but he gets an instinctive feeling that the duster would know just as much as he does. He abstains.

Claudius turns from the shelves and their tempting childhood toys to flee from the room, but…

Something is leaking in from under the door. It's gold and shiny like the jewelry he favors so unequivocally, and its movements as it slithers under the door are erratic, sapient. The door itself bows inward with a loud creaking groan. Claudius backs up against the shelves he'd just tried to run from.

"H-Hey, Nataki, babe, I was just joking about actually using you to clean up a mess. I don't think you could do a thing about something like this. There's too much."

"It's alright, Sire."

The Gold gathers around his feet before he can respond, and he sees suddenly that it's not, as he had assumed initially, melted, scorching gold, but is more akin to silken strings of sewing thread. It's impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins, and they're so tightly packed together he's certain he'll have little choice other than to suffocate should they continue to spill in like this and fill the room to its brim.

Beside him, in the thick tangle of gold thread, he spies an eye. Not a real one. It's undeniably his own symbol, the glyph used throughout all of the kingdom's documents (and beyond) to refer to the Cat King and his throne and crown. Perhaps Lune will choose his own symbol, and the eye will pass into obscurity. The thought makes him sad.

That eye is joined by another opposite it, and then another on the far side of the room, and another and more and more.

"Nat—"

All around him, the eyes begin closing— painted eyelids shuttering, ochre pupils vanishing. And each one sings when it does.

"Natori—" The king manages faintly, settles on, even though Natori isn't here. "Natori, help—"

The water closes in over his head.

He floats until he stops, staring up at the sky and listening to it buzz all the while, until the universe sees fit to deliver him to an apparent riverbank, and when he picks himself back up, it doesn't take him long at all to observe that the sky and the land trade appearances as he sets himself rightside up— the sky now inky black and the earth under his feet purple-ish red, metallic; there's a chrome-like shine to it that he somewhat admires. There are also modest pinpricks of white nothing scattered about the ground, and the king finds he's unable to parse whether they're lights or holes, and vows then to meticulously pick his way around them.

He eventually finds Nataki again, swaying back and forth in the minuscule waves upon a rocky beach. He gazes down at the beach from up high, higher than he's ever been, but when he reaches down to pluck the duster from the waves, he has only to open his paw to do so. The water is cold, and filled with ice cubes.

"Did you miss me?" The king asks him, another pointed jest because he has yet to learn his lesson.

"Yes," Nataki answers without hesitating. "You've said already you missed me. So I missed you."

Somewhere, Claudius feels a barbed sting of annoyance, and feels also almost as cold as the water he'd just rescued Nataki from. When he speaks again, there's a definite touchiness to his voice that he knows would normally make Natori side-eye him uneasily and think twice about what he said to his king. "That doesn't make me feel all that special, babe."

"You're not special."

Now his veins and blood have turned to ice as well.

"Stop talking," he bites out impulsively.

Nataki obliges, much to the king's frustration.

"Say something!" He tries again.

"You're not special."

"No!"

"What would you have me say, Sire? I shall abide." Natori sounds tired again.

He doesn't know. He doesn't know. His mind is racing.

"Say you love me." He doesn't remember thinking that.

Nataki says nothing.

"Say it! Say you love me!" Its genesis may remain unclear, but in his usual way, he's found himself intensely focused in on this one solution in a staggering case of tunnel vision. He must hear these words. He will die if he doesn't hear them. He grasps the bamboo stem of the duster in both his paws like an iron vise, and bows it centimeter by centimeter into a slight arc. The inherent flexibility of the bamboo means it doesn't snap immediately, but it's moot reassurance when just seconds later Nataki splinters in half.

There's no cry or whimper or other utterance of pain. However, several overwrought seconds later, there is the hushed and subdued confession he doesn't remember wanting. "...yes, Sire. Natori loves you."

Claudius looks from one fractured half to the other wordlessly, numbly, and then sits on his haunches and waits, as he always has before.

"We'll see about that."

Seconds, hours, or perhaps even years later, someone gingerly touches his shoulder, and he jerks away in shock from the sensation.

Natori, the real Natori, is kneeling before him, hesitant paws hovering over his own hands and arms because of the resultant twitch to being touched and looking for all the world like he wants to throw his arms around him. Whether to embrace or strangle him, he's not entirely certain. It's funny how often Natori manages both simultaneously. Claudius watches the two disparate sides battle for supremacy, but it seems only to culminate in Natori bowing his head for a fleeting moment and then fixing him with a relieved, if faltering, smile. His eyes are watering.

"Oh, Sire, I'm just so glad we found you..! I thought— I thought we might not..." He trails off.

The Cat King looks from his advisor's face to the split duster still in his paws, one half in each paw, and then attempts to hand the half with the silk strips to Natori.

"Sorry I broke you, babe."

Natori takes the broken and faded duster half with a quizzical look, but he stumbles only slightly over his own response. "Th-That's quite all right, Claudius."

"Father!"

Oh, that's right— he's a father! The Cat King grins, mostly to himself, when that tidbit of information about himself decides to return. What exactly had he believed their relationship to be before now, then? He can't say. King and soon-to-be-king, both total strangers to each other. It must have happened at some point. In any case, he's more than just a little elated at the sight of his son.

"Ah— he's a little out-of-sorts, it seems," Natori sees fit to warn as Lune arrives.

"I'll say I am, babe. Where have you been? I've been sat here with no one but Nataki for company."

"Father, you've been wandering around in Suguroku Space," Lune explains as Natori glances to the broken hataki in his paws with a dubious expression.

"In what..?"

"Suguroku Space," Lune repeats.

"You made that up."

"It's that sliver of ambiguous space in the border between our kingdom and the human world, Sire," Natori clarifies, in the resigned, disapproving tone he's so skilled at assuming. "I believe you've occasionally referred to it before as, erm… Snake Land."

Hm. The golden tree roots and fingers in the sky. Perhaps they were actually snakes. They appear to have vanished for now.

"Well how in the hell did I end up there?" Ah, there arrives even more muted disapproval from his advisor. How long had he been lost in this Sucrose Space anyway? His brain feels like a waterlogged sponge.

...More than it usually does.

"Most likely you were lured in by something you found particularly captivating, Sire," Natori answers contritely. He makes not even the most vague of hypotheses over just what this captivating thing could have been, and not for the first time, the Cat King feels an odd affection for his advisor's tact. It doesn't come naturally to the king himself, that's for sure. While he doesn't particularly wish it did, when it's really quite obvious it's been utilized, he finds he does rather admire the skill.

Then, curiously, but with an unusual edge of caution, "...How long have I been there?" Here, he corrects himself, glimpsing still the cracked sugar glass sky and the flickering patterns lurking behind it.

"About a week," Lune says.

"...oh."

A week. An entire week spent wandering about this bizarre realm with nothing but an old-fashioned duster for company. It doesn't feel like it'd been that long.

"I have maybe four specific memories from… all this."

Lune and Natori near imperceptibly nod in pity, but ultimately say nothing.

"You are real, aren't you?" The king finally stands, gently placing the other half of Nataki on the ground before looking as closely at his two 'rescuers' as he wishes; smoothing down the mussed fur atop Lune's head (he must have been stressed; he's normally so put-together), patting Natori's cheeks before immediately tugging none-too-gently at one of his ears.

"Yes, Father, we're real," Lune sees fit to hastily step in, then, placing his paws on his father's in a forgiving attempt to push them back down and away from Natori's ear.

"Well, what took you so damn long?" The says. "And who have I been talking to, then?"

Lune smiles and shrugs, an earnest, sheepish thing, and cants his head a little. "We've done our best to search nonstop, Father. But you know what they say about herding cats."

"Please, let's not idle, Sires. There's no telling how long our exit will stay."

"Oh, right."

As they walk, while Natori lingers nervously between Lune and the king, always so careful not to leave too much space between one or the other, Claudius seizes his opportunity— reaching out, taking the other cat leniently by the wrist, and asking him, "...Do you remember the story I told you once, the one about the time I tried to run away?"

Natori, who had been rather distractedly looking between him and Lune in apparent preparation to call to the prince, turns now his full attention upon the king, and appears to search for something in his face.

"...yes, Sire," he answers at last. "We came looking for you."

The king's stomach flutters like a wing beat. His hold on Natori's wrist wavers just slightly.

"And what were you made for?"

This one gives Natori pause, but he doesn't glance to Lune or to the side to escape the king's attention this time. Instead, his gaze gradually glazes over, either in thought or memory, and because of that Claudius wonders if perhaps the inquiry is familiar.

Eventually, once he appears to settle on an answer, the detachment in his eyes diminishes, and Natori lays his other paw over the one Claudius is using to grip his wrist. He smiles at the king, easy, pitying.

"I was made to look after you."