ZERO / BLEACH / TWIST / REVERSE / DYE / RED / TIE (HERE) / RED
With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hunger was the first thing he remembered. The desperation clawing at his insides until all he could think of was eating. It didn't matter where it came from. Anything would do.
Some part of him knew that he should have had a mother. He was too small. Too weak to be on his own. Where had she gone? Was she dead? Had she abandoned him? He couldn't even remember what she looked like.
The others in this village weren't very friendly. They were more prone to chasing him off than helping. The kindest ones ignored him entirely.
He found a child rooting through the trash. It was clumsy, loud thing. When it finally noticed him, it froze.
"Are you hungry?" it asked.
He stayed very still. He glanced around the alley. The neighborhood children sometimes liked to chase him and hit him with sticks if he was caught unawares. This could be a trap.
"I'm hungry too. But…" His eyes flickered back to the child when he heard something hit the ground.
It was a hunk of sausage.
"If you eat around the fuzzy bits, it's pretty good," the child said. It went back to rummaging through the garbage.
He took one step. Then two. The child had its back to him. He rushed forward to grab the food. Then he scurried off in the opposite direction. Heart racing, stomach flipping. The child didn't follow.
He squeezed into a nook to gulp down the food. The salty, greasy taste of meat was one he hadn't experienced in quite some time. He cleaned his paws and peeked out from his hiding place. There was no one. For the first time in a long time, he went to sleep with a full stomach.
The next time he wandered down that alley, the child wasn't there. He sniffed through the trash, eyes flickering all around with each step. Before he could salvage anything, a larger cat appeared. With a hiss and a few well-placed swats, he was sent skittering out of the alley with blood dripping from his ear.
He wandered for a few more days. A few bugs and scraps here and there kept him from collapsing. The hunger pushed him to wander into busier parts of the village. The noise and movement has always kept him away. But now, as the hunger made his stomach ache, he slunk his way down the muddy street.
"And stay out! You nasty little thing!"
He jolted back several paces.
A man with a rounded stomach thundered out of a nearby building. He wielded a broom that used to swat at a skinny shape made of bruised knees and ragged hair. It was the sausage child. It fell, hands flailing to cover its head against the blows.
"Thieving little rat!" the man bellowed.
He stared at the scene. Then his eyes were drawn to the open door. The smell of food wafted out.
As the man continued his tirade, he darted through the shadows to slip inside. He clawed his way up the counter and grabbed the first thing he could find. As he fled out the door, the man stopped.
"Hey! Get back here!" the man shouted.
He ran as fast as he could. Teeth digging into his prize. Feet squelching through the muck as he darted around corners and wove between feet. He ran for a long time, until he was absolutely sure that the man was gone.
In some secluded corner, he tore into the loaf of crusty bread. Even covered in dirt and leaves, it was a welcome relief to the gnawing hunger that seemed to always scratch at his stomach.
The smell of blood interrupted his feast.
He lifted his nose to sniff the air. It was nearby.
He stared at his food for a long time. Then, gripping it in his teeth again, he followed the scent of blood to another nearby street.
The sausage child lay slumped at the end of the alley. One of its eyes was bruised shut, swollen and purple like the overripe plums that sat rotting at the foot of a tree. It didn't even notice him until he was standing right in front of it.
It didn't try to grab at him like the other children did.
It was dirty, scrawny. It was like him. Surely, no child with a mother would be laying here like this.
He dropped the bread by the child's hand. When it didn't react, he swatted the bread closer to it. The ugly thing was weak. It was in pain. It would need food to survive.
"For me?" it asked.
He took a few steps back and sat. Tail swishing as he scrutinized the child.
The child struggled to sit up. It grasped the bread with both hands. It stared at the food, eyes shining with longing. And then, it broke the loaf in two. It tossed one half toward him before it tore into the other half.
He watched the child eating for a long time before he ventured forward to reclaim the other half of the bread. He ate, cleaned his paws, and then scrutinized the child one more time before he hopped onto a ledge.
It didn't cry. It didn't try to follow after him.
He perched there to sleep for the night. He pretended that it wasn't to watch over the strange little sausage child. After all, humans were cruel creatures. What did it matter if there was one less stumbling around?
In the morning, the child was still there. Curled into a little ball.
He scoffed.
Humans were so weak. A little chill in the night air. A little fall from a roof. There were so many little ways for them to die.
He sat there, tail flicking back and forth as he considered what to do.
He jumped down to land in front of it. The child didn't stir. He drew closer, sniffing until he could feel the puffs of its breaths.
Not dead then. Good.
He checked around the alley again before he curled up against the child's stomach. It was surprisingly warm there. And when the child woke later, it didn't try to pull his tail or poke at his torn ear.
There was no reason to stay with this child. It was not agile like he was. It would slow him down.
Still, the following night, he followed its scent to curl up beside it as night fell.
It was reassuring, to have the weight of something behind him as he slept. And sometimes, in the deep darkness, when stray cats or wild dogs crept up on them, he would scatter them with a hiss. And if that didn't work, the child would wake and toss around whatever trash it could find on the ground until the interlopers fled.
It didn't have a home.
Neither did he.
That didn't matter. They wandered the streets together, always within earshot of one another. He would yowl a warning if he sensed something so they could make a quick escape.
He learned, quickly, that other humans did not like the child.
In that way, he supposed, cats and humans were not so different.
"I'm not an 'it', you know."
The child said those words one afternoon as they sat in the shade of a big tree with long branches. The sagging limbs shaded them from the sun.
He cracked an eye open. The child lay on its side, head propped up in one hand.
Other humans couldn't understand him. But this one could. Odd little sausage child with its clumsy hands.
"Do you have a name?" the child asked him.
"No," he replied with a yawn.
"Me neither," the child told him.
He closed his eye again. Until he felt a strange tingle that made his nose twitch. He opened both eyes this time.
It was disconcerting, still. To see the child gathering energy into its hands. The bones of the squirrel they'd just finished picking clean rose into the air. Yellow light engulfed the skeleton before it began walking upright. Back and forth. Like the soldiers they sometimes saw marching with their horses in the distance.
"You're gonna get us chased out again," he warned.
He rolled onto his side, back to her as he stretched his limbs.
"That was 'cuz they saw me talking to a black cat," the child protested. He sniffed.
"It's 'cuz they saw you talking to a cat with a parade of rat skeletons following after you," he corrected.
"They're cute!" the child insisted. He wrinkled his nose.
"And I'm getting better at this. I think I can send them to find food for us if I keep trying."
He sighed. He rolled over to look at the child.
"You're weird," he said.
"I know. That's why my parents abandoned me," the child replied. There was no anger. Just truth.
He looked away, ignoring the rattle of the bones as they knocked against each other.
Magic existed in this world. Fairy dust sparkled on the grass in the morning before the dew had dried. It glittered in the eyes of creatures that slunk through the undergrowth at night.
Magic users were more common in the bigger cities where trade and travel brought them together. In the smaller villages on the outskirts, even one was a rare sight. It didn't help that the people out here were more likely to view magic with suspicion rather than wonder.
The settlements out here in the country were far and few, separated by large swaths of the forest. They were used to that, though. Digging through trash and snatching fruit when no one was looking. And then fleeing in the night when the villagers had had enough of their food going missing.
The child continued to play with magic, despite his warnings. The cat sighed and complained, but he resigned himself to keeping watch.
They found shelter where they could. Ate what they could. The bickering died down a few weeks into their strange partnership. Because no matter what, she split their food down the middle and he swung his claws at whoever dared sneak up on her in the night.
Watch out for those dirty things, parents would say as they guided their offspring to the opposite side of the street.
It was those times that he wished that other people could hear him- not just the child. He wanted to dig his teeth into them before screaming at them to keep their mouths shut. The child pretended not to notice such comments. But only he knew how it shivered in the rain as it hugged him against its stomach to keep him dry. And only he knew how it would shed tears in the night as it woke from nightmares.
If anyone deserved a home, it was this child.
The child just laughed. It was supposed to be growing bigger, but it didn't. The hunger kept it reedy and brittle.
"That's alright. I've got you, right?" it laughed.
"…Yeah. You've got me," he replied as he rubbed along the child's bruised legs.
The more the child practiced magic, the shorter their stays in each village became. The little skeletons could walk around on their own now. They got good at sneaking into cracks and scurrying out with armfuls of crumbs. They weren't very good at doing anything else on their own. And the way their bones chattered together when they ran wasn't the best for avoiding detection.
People screamed when they saw them. And they screamed things at the child.
Cursed.
Wicked.
That made no sense to him. Magic existed. The child used magic. Wasn't that the way things were supposed to be? It stung when the villagers chased them and threw stones. But the child ran without tears. He understood most of the time. But that was one of the rare moments when the child's thoughts remained a mystery to him.
On those days, he curled up closest to the child. He pretended it was the pain from the bruises or the hunger that made him clingy. The child must have known. It hugged him close and he pretended not to hear its sniffles late in the night.
As the leaves turned gold and fell from the trees, they snow began to fall over the hills and the forests. They were still together. That was the way it should be.
That winter, they were crunching through the snow. The child wore boots he had stolen off a windowsill.
"I'm hungry."
"Me too," he agreed.
"Will the next town be safe?" the child wondered.
He considered that as they walked together. The cold was beginning to hurt his paws. He would go for a few more minutes, he decided, before crawling up onto the child's shoulders to rest for a while.
"Doesn't matter," he replied after some time. He stared straight ahead. Trying to imagine what the next place would look like. Not that it mattered. It was always a dirty network of alleys and maybe the sewers if they were lucky. Most villages were too small for a real sewer system anyway.
"Doesn't matter?" the child repeated.
"Yeah. Doesn't matter. I've got your back. You've got mine. We don't need anyone else," he explained. It worried him how he had to spell these things out sometimes. Wasn't it obvious by now?
When he looked over, the child's eyes found his. They were green, like the candy that sat in glass containers in the windows of the stores that chased them away.
"Right?"
"Right."
As the snow continued to fall and the nights grew more frigid, the child developed a cough that wouldn't go away. He did everything he could. He went hunting more often, stole laundry from unattended baskets to clothe the child. No matter how many layers it piled on, the shivering didn't subside. He draped himself over the child's neck and stomach, desperate to keep any bit of heat in that fragile body.
"It's alright if I die. No one will miss me but you," the child rasped one night as the sun began to set.
He glowered at the gold-lit windows around them. All these humans trotted around in furs and boots, yet they all pretended not to see the shivering pile of rags as they walked past.
He had never liked humans. But as the child began to wheeze, a new emotion was born inside him.
Disgust.
Humans were filthy, ugly creatures with even uglier hearts. The only exception lay crumbling beneath him.
He tried not to sleep. What if the child died while he did? Then it would truly have been alone in its last moments. He pawed at the rags he had gathered, trying to cover the child better. Its lips were beginning to turn blue. That couldn't be right.
Birds that normally kept their distance wandered closer and closer. He hated the ones that smelled of death the most. The way they eyed the child filled him with rage. He couldn't even chase them down to rip out their throats. Not when the child was so cold.
When dawn came, somehow, the child's chest was still moving up and down. He had dozed off at some point during the night and woken with a start as the child let out a wet cough.
There were sounds from elsewhere in the village. Soon the baker and other artisans would wake to start churning out their goods. If he timed it well, he might be able to sneak into a storage room to grab something to eat. He slowly stepped off the child and stretched. He would have to be fast and silent.
As he slunk out of the alley, he heard a noise. He scrambled back several steps to watch from the shadows.
He saw pointed shoes that stopped right in front of him. Heard the jangle of coins.
"Fucking hell."
He slowly looked up at the towering figure of a woman wearing a brown cloak. She lowered her hood with both hands. Her hair was gold. The smell of death hung around her, just like the crows. She even had the same greedy look in her eyes as she spotted the child at the end of the crooked alley.
"Is that one your human, kitty?" she asked, hands on her hips.
He couldn't help it. He hissed in response, hackles rising.
The woman laughed. "Aw. That's a 'yes'."
He pounced, ready to bite her exposed ankles. For some reason, he found himself floating in the air. As he struggled to right himself, he saw the woman stride down the alley. She stopped at the end. Crouched in front of the child. She put her hand on the child's forehead.
"You can't help her," the woman said. At first, he wasn't sure who she was talking to. Then the woman looked over her shoulder at him.
"She'll die if she stays out here."
But that was-
"I'll take good care of her," the woman said.
He screamed as the woman lifted the child into her arms. He swore at her, spitting threats she would never be able to understand.
That was his child.
They only had each other in this world. If he lost her…
He stayed levitating in the air after the woman had disappeared. It took a while for his body to begin drifting down to the ground. As soon as his paws touched the dirt, he was running. He followed the scent as best as he could. But at some point, it vanished. As if both of them had disappeared into thin air.
He should have left the village. There was nothing left for him. The other cats were spiteful things that hissed. He hated them almost as much as he hated the birds. And hated the birds almost as much as he hated the humans.
Still, as he dug through the trash, he wondered what had happened to the child. So ragged, he hadn't even realized that it was a girl. Weren't girls supposed to wear pretty things covered in ribbons and lace? Had that child ever touched something like that before?
He got into fights with a few other cats that roamed the streets. It was harder without the child backing him up. And though he emerged alive from each brawl, he didn't always escape unscathed.
A few weeks after the child was taken from him, he sat in a dark corner. His side stung from where another cat had gouged him with its claws. At least the bleeding had stopped.
"I think it was that one."
"No. The ear was wrong."
The second voice made his ear twitch. The scarred one with a notch in it.
"Can't you just grab any of these cats? It's cold out here… Okay, fine. No need to glare at me like that."
The voices drew closer.
He tensed. Ready to jump to safety.
But the clumsy, heavy steps of humans approached. And then a face peered around the corner.
"I knew it!"
It was his child. With its green eyes and the teeth that weren't sharp enough.
It- no- she ran up to him. She held her arms open. He leapt onto her, claws retracted to make sure he didn't scratch her.
She was still too skinny. All sharp angles beneath her clothes. But she was alive. She was warm again. He purred as he rubbed beneath her chin, against her throat.
When he looked up, he saw that the woman was with her. He yowled.
"You wench! How dare you show your face here again!" he screeched. The woman just smiled at him.
The child stroked his back to try to calm him. "Don't be mad."
"I'll rip her face off. Let me go! Ow!"
The child's hands stilled. She pulled him off her shoulder to look him in the face. "You're all beat up. What happened?" she demanded. He refrained from squirming too much as she inspected him. When she discovered the scabbed over slashed on his side, he let out a heavy sigh.
"Doesn't matter. I won," he told her.
The child sighed too.
"Remarkable. That's some bond you have," the woman suddenly spoke up.
He hissed at the sound of her voice. The woman took a few steps closer. He swiped at her.
"Relax, sourpuss," the woman then said. She put her hand on the child's head. The child scowled and swatted the hand away.
"This one refused to eat until we came to get you. I was this close to force-feeding her carrots," the woman explained, pinching her fingers together until they were nearly touching. The child rolled her eyes.
"Go fuck yourself!" he snarled.
"By the way, I can't understand you. Only your contractor can. So go ahead and chatter all you want. All I hear is meow meow meow," explained the woman.
"Fuck off," he spat.
The child laughed. It was such a rare noise from her that it distracted him from his rage. He looked to her.
"Come with me. She'll feed us and you can curse at her as much as you want," the child told him. He scrutinized her. There were no new bruises as far as he could see. She was still a little stick of a thing. Her voice was still raspy, but the worst of her cough was gone too.
"And if she's evil?" he asked her.
The child's smile faded. "You think she might be?"
He wished he hadn't said that. The fear was back in her eyes.
He bared his teeth. "If she is, I'll bite her throat out," he said.
The child was smiling again.
That was right.
The woman ruined the moment. She put her arm around the child's shoulders. When he went to bite her hand, his mouth bounced off her skin. He tried again. His teeth couldn't even touch her. He growled at her.
"My name is Tsunade. And you two are?" the woman asked, pointing at them with her free hand.
The child blinked at her. "We don't have names," she replied.
"Fuck you," he then added. The child looked at him for a moment before she announced, "He says 'fuck you', by the way."
The woman laughed.
"You're like two peas in a pod," she chuckled. She released the child and folded her arms across her chest instead. She scrutinized them both, eyes narrowing.
"Fine. Then you'll be Sakura," the woman pointed at the child. Her finger then moved toward the cat. "And you'll be Madara."
The child wrinkled her nose. So did the cat.
"Aren't they cute? They rhyme," the woman giggled.
The child scowled at her. "No they don't."
"This woman is an idiot," he grumbled. He twisted around in the child's arms. He climbed up until he could drape himself over her shoulders and neck. To trap what warmth he could there. She raised the hood of her robe to cover him.
They began walking down the alley, toward the main street.
"I'm serious. I'll kill her if I have to," he insisted.
The corner of the girl's mouth turned up.
"I know you will."
"I've got you."
"I know."