And now the story can begin in earnest. :) I hope you enjoy!

When Luka came to, she knew vaguely that she had never really passed out in the first place. Or at least, it felt like she hadn't. It was as if her brain had been removed and locked in a jar, awake and screaming. A living nightmare, a dreamscape she was conscious in, pure emotion with blinding awareness, not a second where there were inexplicable hallucinations, where her prefrontal cortex had checked out. So it wasn't a question of 'coming to'. Rather, the world had to return to her. It did so, slowly, though not due to a lack of effort. The panic she had felt was still there, the anvil in her gut had never faded, but instead of standing, she was lying down, and the lights, they were bright. They were so bright.

"What?"

The voice was loud. Not painfully so, not quite, but it felt like it rang through her skull. It was wholly unlike any hangover pain: the sound filled her head so completely, she could almost taste it.

Before she could further gather her bearings, a hand pulled at a blanket that covered her. Goosebumps broke out over her whole body. Before she could complain, or question whether she was clothed or not, something grabbed at her neck.

It wasn't a hand. It couldn't be. It was so massive. It was too strong. It was the size of her whole upper back, it could crush her ribcage. And it gathered her skin, pulled at it, tugged to the extent that it might peel her, but it somehow didn't, then it lifted her off the ground like she was a basket of apples.

"A... A random, long-haired cat?" the voice asked, so loud.

And then it shook her. It rattled her very body, and she felt it: she had her four limbs. She had all her fingers and toes. She had...

The anvil dissolved into something sour. Terrible, corrosive fear.

"You can't be just a domestic longhair!" a voice exclaimed. "You're too smart, too beautiful, to be anything but, I don't know, an angora! A maine coon!"

She blinked; the lights were still too bright, the colors weren't all there, but the terrible realization dawned on her. Those cats in the cages, the machine...

"You were supposed to be expensive!" the voice hollered. No, it was Gakupo. It was Gakupo talking to her, holding her up, doing so with such ease, because she was a cat.

She prided herself on being a rational person. The evidence was there, as circumstantial as it was. There was also the immediate evidence: she didn't feel like herself. She was too lightweight, there was something that had to be a tail attached to her spine, and she was completely out of sorts.

But she didn't believe it. She couldn't. Gakupo didn't turn her into a cat. Couldn't do that. That technology didn't exist. Even if it did, why would...

"What a tremendous waste of time," Gakupo hissed, still holding her by the neck. "If exceptional people don't automatically make exceptional cats, then... Is it chance? Will I have to kidnap hundreds of people to hopefully get a dozen of cats worth selling?"

He was moving, she felt it in the way she rocked back and forth, feeling like coffee sloshing in a cup. And the more she sloshed, the more she knew, she just knew that there was no way she was human any longer. Nothing was right.

She didn't dare open her eyes.

"I must have done something wrong in the transformation process. I mean, it's all well and good that they're alive and healthy, but... I suppose there isn't a genetic factor for talent. But beauty? Hm."

That was when she heard the sound of a key entering a keyhole. It was metal; the kind of keyholes that sat in the doors of the cages.

She was right. She was a cat, just like all the other cats in that room; once people, now locked, imprisoned, forced to watch as he brought in more people to condemn them to the same fate.

The only thing that stopped her from squirming was the presence of the huge, terrifying, strong hand that clutched her by the skin of her neck.

"Perhaps I could force the transformation to give me a specified result," he mumbled on, lifting her up and gracelessly letting her rest on the bottom of the cage. It was metal, cold, and ungiving. "That would make things complicated if I ever decide to turn them back, though..."

He released her, and Luka finally dared open her eyes.

It was a blurry mess. Something huge, so absolutely huge was pulling away; his hand, so big it could envelop and crush her skull, and behind that, the man, towering, his face like a door. All in gray, blinding pale gray, yet she saw the blurry reflection of light on the glass as he started closing the door.

She didn't have time to think. She scrambled to her knees, her feet, no... Yet she scrambled forward, diving down into the shrinking gap between the door and the cage.

"No you don't!" he exclaimed, and the hand was back, crushing her, pulling at her.

Fear reminded her that, in all likelihood, she had knives on her feet. She opened her hand, flexed her fingers, hoped that it would result in actual claws, and buried them in his hand. When she felt skin unknit under her fingertips, the fear squelched into disgust.

"Fuck!"

She didn't have time to experience regret. As he withdrew his hand, she lurched forward, falling one, two, three stories down to the ground, barely landing on her feet.

"Don't you dare—!"

She looked up at him. Blurry, gray, and towering, he was a giant. A terrible, monstrous giant, in a gigantic cavernous room.

No, she knew this room. She had walked into it herself. She knew where the machine was, where the door was supposed to be, the console...

But there was no way out.

Despite that, she ran, struggling to gain speed, adapting as best as she could to run better, faster, more comfortably.

"Get back here!"

He was so fast. His feet could crush her while his paces felt like they were numerous times the length of her body. She heard his huge steps right behind her, scurried towards the tangles of cables, and wondered where they went. Up the wall, up to where...

With no other plan in mind, ducking under the cables, avoiding his attempts at grabbing her, she scurried up the wall, digging her fingers into the rubber coating, climbing up as quickly as she could.

"Luka, no, you're going to damage—"

Two hands wrapped around her body. It was like having a whole carpet wrapped around her in an instant, being stuffed in a barrel, being squeezed, suffocated. She screamed, startling him, which allowed her just enough wiggle room to climb on, faster still, burying even her toes into the mass of the cables.

"Get back down here!" he yelled. He was so loud. "There's nothing up there!"

She climbed on, and only when she reached a ledge did she stop to breathe. Settling between two cables, not too far from the edge, she paused.

That scream... That terrifying sound she had made...

"If you come down here, I can at least feed you and change your litter box!" Gakupo called up.

Looking down, she finally saw Gakupo with a sharp image, his features twisted into anger. But there was almost no color, just a little whisper of something bluish in his hair, but no purple.

"If you starve up there, then that's not my fault!" he added.

Luka withdrew back to the safety of the ledge. She felt so small. Her fingers...they were nails. And her ears, they were huge, mobile, she felt them twist and turn as she picked up the sound of Gakupo's angry pacing.

She blinked, breathed some more. There had to be a way out. A way out, a way home, she would call her parents, and scream that horrible scream until they would come by. She'd type out a message or something, prove that she could understand them, that she was their daughter, and that Gakupo was insane and had kidnapped half a dozen people or so and turned them all into cats.

How absolutely crazy. She panted, realizing that panic was setting in; nothing was right. Her limbs weren't right. Her face, what she saw, none of it was right.

Luka couldn't look at herself just yet. She didn't know if she could stomach it. So instead, she let her eyes take in her surroundings.

"I've got all night, you stupid cat!" Gakupo called up towards her. "Sooner or later, you'll change your mind, and maybe I'll remember to give you fresh food and water every day!"

She ignored him. She had to. Instead, keeping herself concealed, she saw the bare-bones rafter system from which the lights were suspended. There were cables everywhere. Cables, cables, and more cables. Above it all loomed another layer of cement, closing around it all like an uncompromising box, just barely high enough to let her walk around on the ledge. While it wasn't so dark that she couldn't see, even when she peered into the corners the furthest away from the lights, it was just all so awfully blurry. She took a cautious step, uncertain of what was directly in front of her, and then another, only to remember that she walked with all four limbs now.

She let out a small whimper as it continued to sink in what exactly had happened to her.

"Ha, feeling regret already?!" Gakupo yelled.

Luka paid him no mind, trying to spy any exit out of the room, proceeding slowly, carefully. First, she tried to get closer to the wall which had the entrance door, but the cables didn't go through that wall, leaving her with a bare smooth surface.

She squinted at it, finding no text, no openings, not a clue that there would be a way out. But it was a smooth surface, she didn't know how far it was exactly—

She knew she'd gotten close enough when she felt it brush against her cheek. No, not quite. A whisker. A whisker that grew out of her cheek, that bent as it brushed against the wall.

She shivered. She wanted to raise a hand, touch the whisker, but she remembered that she would find more than one whisker, she'd find a paw instead of a hand, and she would probably faint.

Instead, she made a u-turn, back towards the far side of the room.

Knowing that her whiskers would warn her when she got too close to anything, she advanced with slightly more confidence, despite how blurry things got as they approached the immediate vicinity of her face. She kept her attention on the narrow part of her vision that was sharp, unable to tell how far that was from her exactly. There were only more cables, bare cement bearing some damage, some notches, and the bare rafters.

"Tick tock, Luka! You really think you can keep this up?"

She ignored him, forging on. But she found no gaps in the ledge above this wall, and she doubted she would find anything above any of the other three walls: just more space to put the excess cabling, and whatever they would plug into.

She paused when she remembered the fans. The machine had gotten awfully warm: were those air conditioning units? Crouching so she would be hidden between the cables, she looked down to where they were. It was blurry, but it looked like the nearest one was close by. In fact, she could hear it, the whooshing subtle, but audible. So the large ears served their purpose.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are..."

Luka swallowed thickly, digging her fingers and toes back into the thick cable material as she slowly, slowly climbed down.

Nothing about that was right. She was too heavy to do such a stunt, yet she could carry herself just fine. Her fingers, no, her claws, offered more than enough purchase.

It wasn't right at all.

Once she heard she was level with the fan, she peeked to look at it; just like everything else, it was blurry. When her vision briefly darkened, she suppressed a surprised peep, but it was only the blade of the fan. And then another. And then another. It spun quickly, but not too quickly, she hoped. The bars, if she remembered correctly, were far apart enough to let her slip through...

But then what would she find? She had no idea about how air conditioners worked. She didn't smell fresh air. Then again, she didn't know if fresh air would smell the same to her now as it once did.

Luka grit her teeth; she was a cat for crying out loud. Her day couldn't get much worse. If it was a dead end, then so be it. She'd find another way out. If Gakupo would catch her, she'd rip his face to shreds. And if she did end up in a glass cage...

Well, people would notice that she was missing, right? It might take a little longer, but eventually they would find her there. They had to.

She tensed her body, quietly bobbing her head to the beat of the fan blades. She would see their dark shapes pass by, and could hear the faint whoosh. Then, she counted down. Three, two, one...

"There you are!"

Luka jumped forward, landing in the fan case, certain she had seen the blade go behind her—

Then it nicked her tail, and she howled.

"See, Luka? You're just getting yourself hurt! Come on out, play nice!"

She curled against the far wall, as far from the blade as she could. Her tail, how strange, what a terrible concept, but it was real, and it was in pain. It throbbed like her finger did when she'd close the door on it, but it felt worse, like falling on her tailbone. She kept her eyes on the fan, seeing the bright lights on the other side, but no other movement.

Gakupo probably couldn't reach so high.

Right after that comforting thought came to her, the fan came to a stop.

Fear returned with all the energy it brought. She pushed her body against the wall, only to feel it give in a little.

She turned towards it, seeing nothing at all because everything was still so damned blurry, but her whiskers caught in a rough surface.

A filter?

She pushed with all her might, digging her nails into the metal, and there, in the corner, it was looser, it gave way, a tiny space barely the size of her head.

"No! Don't you dare!"

She pushed at it, pushed through, and fell.

What had once felt like three stories was suddenly a joke. She fell for ages, twisting her body around to get her feet under her, everything colorless and vague, and when her whiskers warned her that something was coming, it was already too late.

A branch knocked into her, then another, and after what felt like an eternity, she rolled into a bush below.

She gasped, felt her limbs; except for her tail, nothing hurt. Looking above her, she saw only the huge, smooth surface of one of the numerous buildings of Panthera Technologies through the dense leaves of whatever tree had saved her. It was all so blurry she couldn't even see the filter she had pushed through.

Turning her head, she saw the distant city lights.

Luka didn't think about it for more than a second.

She ran.

Luka couldn't run for long at all. She liked to think that she was fit, especially given her time spent in the gym, but she was far too winded far too quickly, barely getting away from the building before she needed to stop, her body warm, overheating. So she walked, more and more aware of the fact that she was barely taller than the long grass around her, that she was walking on her fingers and toes, that the throbbing pain behind her was her tail, that she was covered in long fur, and that the world around her was bleak and colorless.

Worse still, the true scale of the distance she would have to cover sank in when she was confronted with the gate that surrounded the buildings.

Luka sat down, flabbergasted. The gate was less than a stone's throw from the building. Going to the gate from the building and back wouldn't even count as a stroll; it would be more like nervous pacing. But it felt like it had taken hours. She'd run, for crying out loud!

She almost collapsed, but she was already sitting down, and a quadruped, her hands on the floor. No, her fingers on the floor, her fingers with knives, knives covered in blood.

She was a cat. She had been turned into a cat. This was a cat's body, a cat's vessel with which it interacted with the world, with which it moved, breathed, ate, and existed.

None of this was hers. The more she took pause, thinking, the more she observed herself. And the more she analyzed, the more it all made her feel like she was falling apart from the inside out. She would be assaulted with a billion little expectations, things that were normal, only to have each and every one of them trumped, and this happened again and again for every second that she existed. Every breath went through a nose of the wrong shape, every glimpse showed paws instead of hands, every sound made ears move atop her head, every thought made a bruised tail flicker, and the whole world around her was a scale she simply couldn't understand. The grass around her was almost as tall as she was, the gate towered taller than any building she'd ever seen. And seeing...? It was a dark world, yet a strangely illuminated one. She could see, stark grays sticking out from the obscured backgrounds, despite the pitch dark night around her. There was no color, almost no sharp edges, only blurred, semi-certitude of the grass, the fence, the fields beyond. Worse yet; the blades of grass closest to her caught on her whiskers, a sense she'd never felt before. Like a tug on her lip, yet she sensed that, with practice, she'd eventually be able to feel exactly how far the grass was from her, how solid it was. And speaking of strange sensations, there were those rotating ears, that flickering tail which now slashed to and fro.

Luka let herself sink to her belly, once again having all her expectations defeated. Any way she wanted her limbs to bend, she'd bend another way. The elbow was too high, as was her ankle. Her belly touched the floor too early, and despite being laid on the floor, her head was still held high.

She wasn't able to do that without some demanding physical stretching, normally.

But none of this was normal.

She breathed for a bit, out of that foreign nose. With her strange ribcage, those alien lungs.

Luka took a minute to review the facts. If it wasn't so dark that she couldn't see, it was thanks to the fact that cats were crepuscular creatures. They had excellent night vision. There's a film at the back of her eye that reflects light back so that she gets a double dose of the outdoor light, so she could see in near total darkness. The shape of her pupil would also help, though she believed she'd have limited color vision during the day. Cats are digitigrade too, she told herself, so walking on her fingertips was normal. It also explained the elevated elbow, the heightened ankle. The tail had helped to right her when she had fallen. The whiskers were her last-minute warning system for incoming objects, further assisting her in the dark. And, like most mammals, cats were built for short bursts of speed.

No wonder she had no stamina; as she was, she'd never run a marathon again, much less run back to the city.

She wasn't anywhere close to home. But pushing through the gate would get her closer, and so would every following step.

Anxiously, she gazed over the fields before her. She could barely see the glimmer of the city ahead, and the highway whispered off to the side.

She'd walk along the highway, she decided. Both to deter other inhabitants of the fields and to increase her odds of coming home. She could count the exits, take the correct one, then going home would be a question of muscle memory. Painfully adjusted for scale, perhaps, but... It was the best plan she had.

After squeezing through the fence, Luka walked, awkwardly and stiffly, towards the distant rumble of the highway. The grass around her was tall. Her body felt weightless and frail. Despite how small and weak she felt, she moved so effortlessly. Part of the mind whispered it had to do with the square-cube law, but she was constantly distracted; grass tugged at the whiskers on her face and wrist alike, small noises kept asking for attention from her ears. Her trail throbbed too, an unwelcome addition on top of a whole pile of new stimulus.

She had never walked through the world like this before. She didn't know how to work with this interface. It was all too new, altogether too foreign; Luka barely felt real at times, as if she was dreaming, disconnecting from the whole of reality completely, only to be stabbed back into place with a new particularly unpleasant feeling.

All things said and done, she didn't know that much about cats. There were those videos her friends had shown her. There was the running joke that they were jerks (though Luka doubted any cat could ever be a jerk intentionally), that they pushed things off of ledges for laughs, and that they were fond of boxes, or interestingly enough, simple sheets of paper on the ground. These were likely because watching things fall was interesting, and that boxes were secure locations; while cats were predators, they were also, due to their size, prey.

This made Luka come to a slow stop.

Prey in a wide open field.

Her heart in her throat, she quickened her step towards the highway. What could grab her? An owl? A fox? Would those critters dare venture close to a highway? Or would the lights there simply illuminate her, their meal, more easily?

No, the highway was the best bet. It would be dangerous, bu—

A twig snapped behind her. Luka didn't even need to turn around; her ear did the job just as well.

She didn't even think; she ran. And faster she ran when she heard noise behind her, doing her very best to propel herself forward with four silly legs, her toes hitting the dirt below hard, ears pressed down against her skull, her tail sticking out sorely, so close to whatever was behind her.

And run she did, for as long as she could, and then longer still. She panted, warmth blossomed within her chest with every pump of her muscles, turning to heat, turning to a searing burn, and still she didn't want to stop.

A heat stroke. This is what stopped most critters from running for too long. They cooked from the inside. Yet she still didn't stop, even when the noise behind her quieted, even when the lights ahead grew brighter, brighter still, and finally, her toes hit pavement.

She came to a halt as quickly as her toe pads could bear. But they were chafed, the burn in her chest was so hot it was so sickening she thought she might throw up.

A car roared by with such noise that she jumped.

They were huge.

Then another, the noise deafening, the speed with which they traveled absolutely astonishing. Eyes wide open, Luka tried and failed to keep her eyes on the next one; the lights blinded her, and then it roared by, only to be followed mere seconds later by another, then another. And on did those huge screaming giants speed by, causing only pain in her eyes, ears, and her sense of safety.

And still, the highway felt like it was the best bet.

Luka retreated to the tall grass bordering the road, only just enough to disappear, and followed the roaring sound in the direction of the city. Perhaps, nobody would spot her and attempt to 'rescue' her. Perhaps, nothing else would spy her as a snack. Perhaps, going home would go smoothly from then on. All she had to do was walk.

The more Luka walked, the more the reality of her new situation gently sunk in. It was both in body and in her relationship to reality; her shoulders now sat parallel, facing one another, instead of staying more or less on the same flat plane, and she was prey. Her arms and legs were roughly the same length, heels always high above the ground, and most people would consider her a pet. Sore little paw pads protected her palms and fingertips, and for all intents and purposes, she could no longer live as a sentient, thinking being. While she knew she was a person, nobody else would. Somehow, that was what mattered.

It was awful. Everything was off. It was strange and awful and she still didn't want to look down and be confronted with her new reality. She didn't want to remember the sounds she had made when she had screamed and whimpered. It hadn't been her.

Just keep walking, she told herself. One paw in front of the three others, and keep walking.

It never got darker; the nighttime was surprisingly bright. And no matter how much she blinked or tried, she could not choose where to focus her vision, the sharp area always a distance away. Her whiskers warned her of tall blades of grass as they approached, another new thing, a whole source of input she wanted to ignore but relied too much on.

After what felt like ages, ages of listening to the roaring of the highway, of walking through tall grass, of not looking down, not letting her mind wander too much, she finally saw the lights of the city. Ahead of her it lay, so far.

Driving to her home took forty minutes. With the bulk of the distance being traveled at over a hundred kilometers per hour, she guessed that the highway bit must be fifty kilometers, perhaps a few more. Then another bit to her home, so maybe sixty, sixty-five kilometers? The average walking person traveled at four kilometers per hour, so it would take them around twenty hours. And she was... She had no idea how fast she was going.

She refused to believe that she was almost a full day's travel away from home. She picked up her pace, wondering what a cat's top running speed was, even if she knew that she'd never keep it up. She was still so green to walking on her toes, her tail still hurt, and the way her body bent was just...

None of it was right. And the sooner she could get home, the sooner she would be human again, and she wouldn't have to learn how to deal with any of this.

Luka sprinted, running as fast as she dared, breathing deep, keeping it up for as long as she could, until she felt like she was going to cook on the inside. She stopped immediately, panting, wondering how these animals ran at all if they got so hot so quickly.

She hadn't managed half a minute at top speed. And it cost her almost all her mobility; she could barely walk, even though she'd been sure she'd played it safe this time.

Luka gulped and resumed walking as best as she could.

She'd walk for days if she had to. After all, what choice did she have?

It took Luka a bit of practice, but she soon managed to maintain a faster pace by jogging, briefly sprinting intermittently when she felt it was safe to. The cars, which gradually decreased in number, continued to fly by, but she saw the city grow closer and closer, slow and steady. Her progress, while at a snail's pace, was becoming tangible, and she had hope that she would at least be within the borders by dawn.

There were obstacles, however; each exit from the highway meant a large road in her way. She counted them, hoping that it would help her figure out how close she was getting, but she quickly realized that she had never kept count of how many exits separated her and her workplace.

Crossing each was a terrifying challenge. There were no crosswalks on those roads, not so far outside the main city. What was easier, was to approach the highway itself; this meant she only had to keep her eyes on the single-lane on/off ramps, where cars were still accelerating or already slowing down. In the middle of the night, most of these had next to no traffic to begin with, so after some nervous waiting and watching, she darted across each before once again distancing herself from the highway altogether.

Unfortunately, the closer she got, the more fatigued she became. It wasn't so much that walking was hard: she had never been so lightweight, and walking on four feet gradually became easier than walking on two. Practice made perfect after all, whether it was forced or not. But it had been a long night, after a devastating event, which had been after an exhausting day at work. It wasn't like sleeping outside was an option, however. Not in the fields where foxes could roam, or dogs, or who knew what else. Part of her thought of looking for a burrow of some kind, but she feared what might happen if there was an owner who would return to find her there. So she walked on, one step at a time, jogging as often as possible, sprinting when she could. Eventually, she almost got good at reading this new body of hers, and she could more readily tell when she was pushing her limits.

When the sky started getting brighter, and the number of cars on the highway started increasing, she finally reached the exit she usually used. She recognized the tall tree next to the off ramp, and could barely make out the writing on the sign. Finally, she could leave the highway and the fields behind, trading them for the gradually growing houses, the rumbling streets, and the people that walked them.

She did her best to follow the road she drove home, but the sense of scale was impossible to translate, and her terrible vision didn't help either. The grays and blues didn't communicate the presence of the most memorable landmarks, and the fine line of sharpness was of no help. Avoiding people only made the whole task even more difficult; they would stop, looking right at her, and lower their hands, rubbing their fingers together, going 'pspsps', forcing her to detour. She didn't want to risk getting grabbed again, squeezed, lifted, choked to death. Then, worse yet, there were the other animals. There were the dogs, barking at her, so loud she thought her head would burst. And there were the other cats that regarded her with wide eyes, their tails low to the ground and twitching from side to side. Awful reflections of her state, looking at her with no thought in their eyes except for maybe wariness or aggression, their territorial spirit obvious. Luka didn't know what was worse; knowing that she looked just like them, that people treated her as if she was one of them, or the simple fact that most of them felt bigger than her.

Long story short, she didn't want to deal with anyone, or anything, at all.

As morning turned to noon, however, Luka was no closer to her home. She wandered to and fro, trying to find the familiar landmarks, clinging to hope only to lose it when an expected road simply didn't show up. She grew less convinced that she was heading in the right direction, would try to backtrack, but couldn't find the signs that pointed to the highway. There was no good way through the city: the sidewalk was too populated, the underbrush had no visibility, and the high gates made her too vulnerable. All this under an increasingly baking sun, which beat down on her every defeat with a searing glare, blinding her the moment she'd look up to see something, cooking her at every mad dash to avoid something, to hide from someone. It baked strange scents out of the earth too. Luka didn't recognize the stench of dirt, or of stagnant water, or of trash. It was all new, processed by a nose she wasn't familiar with, just to add another vexing detail to the whole pile.

She felt so stupid and blind, surrounded by cats who were all better at being cats and people who failed to recognize her as one of them.

It was terrible. It was a whirlwind of information she could not process, much less recognize. She was so tired. Not only was she lacking sleep, she was dehydrated, famished, and her tail still hurt.

It didn't take long for hope to make way to anguish and despair. She couldn't find clean water, she didn't know where she'd find food, and home?

Home was further away than ever before.

She had no choice. Exhausted, at her wit's end, she sat down in a small, shaded alleyway. She didn't hear any other cats in the area, or rats, dogs, anything that could take a bite out of her. Once she was sitting, laying down was easier to consider, easier to do. She only had to let herself sag down, slowly, slowly, and then she could rest her head...

She was losing her mind, she could rationalize that much. She had to find something familiar, something she could read. A store front. A sign. And then, it would just be a matter of figuring out which way she had to go...

But all that required energy. Energy she no longer had. Cats weren't persistence runners, or even walkers. She wouldn't be able to take another step. As she let her eyes droop shut, part of her suspected that she wouldn't open them again, unless someone intervened, a miracle, a curse.

She didn't have the energy to fight it, though. She thought of all the puddles she had turned her nose up to. Those half-open containers filled with old meals. Barely panting, wishing she could at least cry, she let her exhaustion claim her.