A/N: Sometimes an AU sneaks up and kidnaps the muse, and that's exactly the case with this one. This is inspired/based off lin-iva's Coraline AU, which she created for the TCR bday bash, and has very kindly given me permission to play with! (Everyone say thank you, lin-iva!) I'm still in the process of writing this, but I'm updating small snippets on my tumblr (catsafarithewriter) daily under the tag "bedlam au" and will be updating this fic here whenever I have a chapter's worth of snippets. This is a seat-of-my-pants fic, so I apologise in advance for the probably-bumpy pacing ahead, and I hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed creating it :)

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Chapter 1

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There is not a name for the thing that is the Bedlam.

Oh, those who have glimpsed beyond his façade might know him as the Bedlam, but that is merely who he is, not what. It is not the name for his kind, or else his victims might have to consider that the monster they encountered was not alone.

And he isn't alone. His sister – or the closest thing to a sister a thing like the Bedlam can have – is also a creature of web and shadow, with the same appetite for wayward souls. Each in their own spheres, they spin and they dance and they lure mortals into their twisted, button-eyed worlds, tangling them up until they willingly cut the thread themselves which tie them to their own soul.

The mortal he sets his sights now on is a strange one. She is human, certainly, but she runs with Creations, and their world has seeped under her skin. She is human, but only barely. A soul like hers, tainted by immortal magic, would sustain him longer than the usual fare.

A soul like hers would be a feast worth weaving for.

And so he sends his eyes out into the world.

And he watches.

And he waits.

x

Haru never meant to fall for Baron a second time but, as it turns out, she has a type – and that type is unattainable immortal cat gentleman.

She hadn't even fallen for him in the same way, which might at least have been understandable. No, this time she hadn't fallen for his suave ways, his chiverous habits, or his ability to save one in the nick of time and look good while doing it (although none of these things had dissuaded her). This time, she had fallen for him while older, allegedly wiser, and working with the Bureau (which, given the number of near misses, might have nullified the wiser claim) in a hundred mundane little moments.

She fell for his laugh (all of them, from his breathless, I'm about to do something reckless laugh that accompanied them on too many cases, to his sheepish chuckle when he was trying not to encourage more of Muta and Toto's bickering, to the silent laughter she could feel while they sat, shoulder-to-shoulder, reading beside one another). She fell for the way he would read aloud whatever passage had caught his humour, voice velvet-smooth, and the way he would listen to her when she read from her own novel. She fell for their conversational cups of tea, for their shared knowing looks, for the rightness when they worked in tandem on a case.

She fell slowly, gently, until one day she realised that there was no place she'd rather be than alongside him and their Bureau.

The only real flaw (okay, perhaps not the only flaw, but the one which was a source of some consternation) was that Baron was... well, somewhat elusive when it came to voicing matters of the heart. (A cruel irony, given that her first encounter with him, so many years ago now, had been the catalyst for her finding her own voice.)

She was... fairly certain he returned her feelings. 77% perhaps 82% on a good day. After all, there were only so many ways to translate the looks he threw her way and her way alone. (At least, she assumed; she hadn't spotted Toto or Muta receiving any such looks, but that didn't entirely rule out it just being Baron being Baron - i.e. being utterly oblivious as to what someone else would consider flirting.) And, had he been anyone else, she might have plucked up the courage to come forward with her own inconvenient, lovestruck emotions, and hope he either swooned into her arms, or did the polite thing and pretend it never happened if her feelings were somehow one-sided.

But he wasn't anyone else. This was Baron, her coworker (boss? colleague? She wasn't entirely sure what the hierarchy was in the Bureau) for whom the phrase 'needlessly dramatic' had been created, and who had leapt out of a window upon being plied with a love confession at least twice. (And that was counting only windows and only incidences Haru was aware of. She suspected the actual number of times Baron had made a dramatic exit following someone else's outpouring of emotions was probably far, far higher.)

So she knows to hold her tongue, to keep her heart under lock and key where Baron is concerned. And she is okay with this – has accepted this in an adult, mature way (read: complaining copiously to Hiromi, who is rather under the impression Haru is pining after a fellow volunteer at the charity she spends her weekends at) as an unexpected cost of running with the Bureau. After all, the price of a little pining was worth it for the adventure, and magic, and travelling to other worlds which had drawn her back to the Cat Bureau in the first place.

Even if, sometimes, those other worlds don't always agree with her.

She sits on a Bureau armchair now and tries not to bleed onto the furniture. (She had suggested getting fixed up outside, but Baron had informed her in no uncertain terms that she wasn't about to be left on any paving slabs in her current state.) She leans her head back, gently lightheaded from the blood loss, and makes the concious decision to not watch Baron patch up her bloodied shoulder. It wasn't that she was usually squeamish but... well, she didn't really want to think about how much blood she'd misplaced.

"Before you scold me," she says to the ceiling, "you should remind yourself that you would have done the exact same thing if our roles had been reversed."

"Indeed," he replies tightly, "but only one of us isn't going to bleed out if stabbed."

"If I hadn't interceded, he would have burnt you to a crisp. And we both know that that's one thing your Creation tricks wouldn't have saved you from."

"Instead, you take it upon yourself to have a cutlass run through you."

"I didn't mean for it to happen," she argues ruefully. "Strangely enough, I was more occupied with getting the fireglove off him. The cutlass was incidental." Her breath hitches as Baron catches on the wound.

She feels him freeze, and there is an unspoken apology in his next attempt to tend to the injury. "It very nearly wasn't incidental," he admonishes. "A little bit more to the right, and he would have cleaved your heart in two."

"Then it's just as well I dodged left, isn't it?"

"It could have easily gone either way."

"But it didn't. Baron, I know what I'm doing."

"And that is?"

"Well, today it was stopping you from getting turned into ornamental firewood, and only getting minorly stabbed."

"This isn't minor," he grumbles.

"It's not fatal." She rolls her gaze to Baron, raising an eyebrow. "What was I meant to do? Stand back and watch the love of my life be used like kindle?"

His ministrations falter; from this proximity she can see the way his eyes widen, hear the way his breath catches.

Oh.

See, this is why conversations when one is down a pint and a half of blood is a bad idea, she laments. You do stupid things like confess long-repressed crushes and you can't even make a run for it.

"I didn't realise–" he begins. Now he is the one carefully avoiding her gaze, attention fixed doggedly on her shoulder.

"Yeah, well, I did my best to avoid shouting it from the rooftops. Already did that once, it didn't get me very far." She hopes to tug a reluctant smile free with that joke, but his expression doesn't shift.

"How long have you felt this way?"

"About... a year?" Long enough to assure herself she wasn't merely experiencing a repeat of her original schoolgirl crush – that this was, unfortunately, not going anywhere. "I didn't want to make things awkward, and, you know, you don't have the greatest track record with reacting to these sorts of things, so I just..."

"Stayed."

"Yeah." There is a shadow in Baron's eyes which she does not recognise. "Look, I'm an adult. I'm not going to let it get in the way of helping here – I mean, you don't seem to have realised I felt this way until now," which, honestly, she's a little disappointed to learn, "so obviously I've been handling it just fine..."

"Is that why you keep returning here?" he asks. His voice is soft in a way Haru doesn't know how to read. "For me?"

She snorts, and then immediately regrets it as her shoulder blazes into pain again. "I mean, way to reduce me down to a one-note lady, Baron. I come here because I like the work we do here – I like the other worlds and the magic and the helping – and I like seeing Toto and Muta too. But," and her body somehow manages to summon up the spare blood for a blush, "I would be lying if I said that spending time with you wasn't also a part of that."

"You nearly died today because of that."

"I've been nearly dying since before we ever met," she reminds him bluntly. "The only reason I ever found the Bureau in the first place was because I ran in front of a speeding lorry trying to save a cat. And then when I was twenty, I nearly drowned trying to haul a kid out of a river. I'm pretty good at nearly dying, emphasis on the nearly."

"One day it may be fatal."

"I'm mortal. That's kind of unavoidable."

Baron is silent for a good long while. He's almost finished binding up Haru's shoulder, when he says, "I'm not so sure this was a good idea."

Haru rolls her eyes. "I did say I was going to bleed all over your furniture if you insisted on me sitting here–"

"Not that." He pins the bandages into place and his hand automatically lingers there, before making the concious decision to break the contact. It feels pained, somehow. "Your being part of the Bureau."

Haru snatches a breath; her shoulder flares up again but she barely even notes it. Baron's words feel like a kick in the ribs. "Because of some near miss? Come on, Baron; I think I've proven that I can handle myself."

"Love makes us reckless," Baron says. His gaze is on his hand. Blood stains the ginger fur; already it's starting to dry a russet-brown. "As it did today. You didn't know you would survive the altercation today – but more importantly, it didn't matter to you if it meant saving me. And I cannot be responsible for that."

"You say that like it wasn't my own choice."

"Then let me rephrase: I don't want to see you throw away your life for me."

"Then look away," Haru says curtly.

"I have." His eyes crinkle, shame lining his brow. "I've chosen not to see the sacrifices you make in your human life to be with the Bureau – the lies you've had to tell, the secrets you've kept, the moments you've missed."

"I haven't–"

"It was your mother's 60th last month," he says, "and you spent it with us, trying to track down an assassin in the Shadow Kingdom."

"To be fair, I didn't know that case was going to overrun so badly."

"I know you had an offer of promotion at your work, but you turned it down when it meant less flexible hours you wouldn't be able to change if a case turned up."

"So I like having more control over my days off, so what?"

"You lie constantly to your best friend to cover up the scars you suffer while working here."

"What am I meant to tell her? That a ghost pirate stabbed me? It's fine, Baron. I have everything under control."

"No," he says, "you don't. But you will soon."

Unease creeps beneath Haru's skin. "What do you mean by that?"

He finally meets her gaze, and the apology in his eyes is overshadowed only by his own surety. "It means, Miss Haru, that from today onwards you are free from the Cat Bureau." He stands, and the distance between them is only a foot, but it might as well have been a mile. "We will not be needing your services again."

x

Once Haru has fully recovered (...more or less) she tries to return to the Bureau, but the Sanctuary's archway is blocked to her. A brick wall stands where the opening to the Sanctuary's courtyard should be, and she knows then that Baron has barred her way for good. For her good.

She paces. She rants. She threatens. She wheedles. But whatever Baron has told the Sanctuary to keep her out, she has no power against.

"Just let me speak to him," she pleads. "Let me see him again."

But the Sanctuary doesn't yield. Perhaps it is right; perhaps her words will have as little effect as they did before.

Still, she wishes she could at least try.

She is on the verge of admitting defeat when it happens. A line fractures through the brickwork.

The crack splinters both upwards and down, and then cuts across horizontally. Haru watches as a doorway forms into place, and there is soft golden light filtering from the other side.

Was this the answer the Sanctuary was offering? Had it found some way to bypass Baron's instructions?

She pushes the door, and it swings inwards to the courtyard. Something calls her in.

She doesn't falter, doesn't think; all she does is storm across to the little green-lined house, barely noting the magic which shrinks her down to a more fitting height, and slams the Bureau's doors open.

And inside stands an almost familiar Creation.