Chapter Three

Naoko looked down, biting her lip self-consciously. She wondered if Haru's future husband had the same ability as Jonathan to draw the truth out of people.

"Pride, I guess. I mean, Haru looked so much like I did at two years old, I thought she would grow up to be just like me and never have problems from the Cat Kingdom. My parents were hippies and I had been raised as a vegetarian. That's why I became attracted to Renny; he was the embodiment of everything my parents didn't like. A great meat cook, captain of the martial arts team in college…" her voice trailed off as she remembered. Her heart could still skip a beat, thinking about his roguish smile. But how could she have a working marriage with a cat? Jonathan looked at her, a small smile on his lips as the screen flickered again.

The scene was now in the human world, on an open grassy field. A group of college girls were lying down on blankets as they giggled over the boys trying to kill each other. Showing an extraordinary amount of bravery, one girl stood up and walked toward the battlefield, her crimson hair flashing gold highlights in the sun. Her target was a well-built youth, his hair somewhere between dark blonde and medium brown. He took down two more opponents before noticing her approach, a heavy blush taking over his features.

"Um, hey Naoko."

The older one turned to the cat at her side, her eyes wide with shock as the girl in the screen shyly asked the boy to teach her how to fight. She never became good at it, but the goal was to spend time with the cute captain. Jonathan grinned.

"You know? Fighting's what brought my parents together as well."

The screen changed again, showing an orange and cream version of Jonathan wearing a gray suit. He grinned as he jumped down a window with a cane raised at a certain brown cat on the training grounds below.

Naoko gasped while the cat next to her laughed. "Father was always a terrible show-off for Mother." Naoko stared in amazement, watching her daughter spar her future husband. Her body moved fluidly in time with her staff, making her movements akin to poetry. But her blows clearly packed a punch.

"Why did Haru turn into a fighter?" Jonathan grinned again, the scene shifting once more.

Haru was in her school uniform again, but her hands had shifted into paws, and she didn't have whiskers yet. She was inside a stone labyrinth, trying to figure out the way to the tower in the middle. But it was much taller than it had been last time it was on the screen, and it was perfectly erect. Behind the brown cat, several green cats were marching toward her from on top of the walls. They jumped off and surrounded her. Haru gasped and held her paws to her chest in terror as they closed in. The leader of the group laughed as he came closest, a spear in one hand.

"I don't know why the King sent all of us after one little girl kitten. Come along Princess, play time's over." Haru suddenly stood straighter, her eyes beginning to flame.

"Oh dear." Naoko giggled, knowing about her daughter's temper.

The brown cat raised her arms in front of her, and kicked the offensive cat hard in the leg with a loud 'Hai-yah!' The cat collapsed, dropping his spear as he cried and bent over the knee. Haru leaned over and picked up the spear, the other cats now watching her with a trace of fear. She glared at them and raised the stolen weapon.

"If I'm going back to the castle, it will be with assembly required. Nobody decides who I am or what I do but me."

What Naoko saw next was one of the strangest sights of her life. Haru may have been a bad fighter, but the guards were clearly worse. They just swung their weapons at her, clearly scared to hurt her, but she slipped between them with ease, her technique slightly recognizable from the kung fu movies the red-haired woman used to watch with her husband, and later caught her daughter watching a few times, the attic being a lousy hiding place. For the first time in her life, she was grateful that her daughter had disobeyed her. Naoko started laughing when she recognized Haru's sorry attempts at a box step, remembering the embarrassing call from school after her first dance lesson.

The box step left several sore spots on the green cats, who finally recognized her as their superior, and ran back to the castle with their tails literally between their legs. The brown cat watched the ones that could still retreat with a mixture of amusement and horror.

"You're kidding. A schoolgirl can take you guys down when she's tired and hungry? If I were your ruler, I'd be ashamed!" she screamed at them before continuing on her way, the spear still in her paw.

Jonathan laughed again, clearly getting a large kick out of his mother's antics.

"After Uncle Lune took the throne, he asked Mother to train his army and be his adopted sister. Since she didn't have a better option, she accepted." He checked his pocket watch, and then got up to retrieve a sword leaning against a corner. He tore a small hole, revealing himself on the other side, facing the cat that had kidnapped Naoko. The Jonathan on her side passed the sword to his past self, and then closed the rip, his grandmother watching him.

"Doesn't it get confusing, traveling around time?" He grinned at her while reclaiming his seat.

"Sometimes. It helps that I keep a careful record of what I do in the order I do it so I can pass it onto my past self when I mature and gain the ability to time travel. It's a very tricky business, and people tend to get irritated with me if I refuse to go back in time to save a bowl from getting smashed or something like that. But you have to consider all angles of what changing one thing can do." He sighed again.

"There's something I didn't have the courage to tell my parents. They know that if I didn't interfere with the day Mother was brought here, she would have lived the rest of her life as a human. She never would have married if she had been returned to you, because no guy could ever compare to Father in her eyes. What I didn't tell them is that all it would have taken then for Mother to stay in a half-cat shape is for me to stretch her speed for five seconds." Naoko stared at him.

"Then what do you call Haru crying on the tower?" He sighed again.

"This truly is going to take a while."

Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Naoko leaned back in her seat, stunned. If Jonathan's father had been with Haru when she had asked for help and Jonathan had just stretched her speed, than the elder Creation would have offered her a place in the Refuge. But then her daughter wouldn't have gone through the training needed in order to prevent various assassination attempts on her royal brother and sister, and Baron would have been too distracted by her to have noticed anything until it was too late. And the Cat Kingdom would have gone to ruin without her daughter's training program for the military.

Understanding the cat side of things, Haru's letters made more sense. When she had sent the first one, Naoko had been alarmed when it said that if the police could find her where she was, than they deserved to bring her home. The letters had told her that Haru had saved a guy's life and accepted a job as part of a security team at his private family estate. She had wondered why the police records could find no trace of a rich guy named Lune.

But something else had been bothering Naoko. Something that she desperately didn't want to bring up, but needed to.

"What happened to Renny?"