Early update because I know I won't get to it tomorrow. I hope you enjoy! Thank you so much for the continued support and feedback, it always makes my week.

Beta-read by Ryu_no_me!

Even with the EMTs rushing in, preparing stretchers, emergency equipment of all kinds, Luka had kept her eyes on the door for as long as she could, waiting for Miku to return. She was sure people also prepared cameras and other recording devices for legal reasons, and there were cops, lawyers, and so, so many people. There was so much else going on, so many bodies in the room, and all these cats waiting in line, but all she did was keep her eyes on the door.

There were a few moments she looked away: the moment the first cat was turned back demanded her attention whether she liked it or not. There was no denying the personal fear and need for reassurance; what did it look like? how long did it take? did they come back dressed? would it hurt?

It looked like a nightmare. The entire archway of the machine would be filled with a light so thick and viscous, it filled the area almost like a liquid filling a glass, stopping at an invisible circular barrier as wide as the physical arch itself. Once filled, the light blinding and colorless (as far as she could tell, anyway), the humming of the machine would briefly sputter and roar, before the liquid luminescence immediately evaporated with a deafening snap. Not counting the machine's warm-up time, it took less than ten seconds.

The EMTs had been prepared: seconds before the snap, they had rushed up to the barrier of light, blankets in-hand. The person who appeared did return fully nude and as limp as a corpse. The doctors wasted no time in wrapping them up, taking their vitals, and removing them from the archway onto a stretcher.

Luka also had to watch as the person slowly came to: just as she had when turned into a cat, consciousness came back rather quickly, even if it didn't translate well to physical action. But she saw them wave, sluggishly kick, and then announce with a mournful, disjointed bark, voice so warped after weeks of meowing and eating with a mouth that didn't belong to them, that it didn't hurt. Then they were carted out, quickly whisked away to an ambulance, the next team ready to treat the following patient.

That answered all her questions. Even when the second cat apprehensively approached the arch, sitting within with their ears down flat, the hum growing and the liquid light pouring, Luka kept her eyes on the door once again, waiting for Miku to come back.

She never did. The second cat was turned into the second missing person, the team looked them over and carried them out of the room, and then the third, and then the fourth, the machine humming and the light blinding and the snap deafening, again and again, always enough paramedics to catch the next body, each group more prepared than the previous one, each repetition going quicker and quicker, and eventually, it was Luka's turn.

She had no idea she had been cat number eight. She would be the last to go before they'd cool down the machine for a short break, she vaguely heard announced throughout the room as she walked up to the arch, her eyes still on the door. All eyes were on her, from the team of medics with their blankets ready, the cameras recording evidence, all the way to Gakupo, and his glare of disdain. Before she could even wonder how he could intentionally mess this up for her, irreparably ruin her life with a body-breaking modification of some kind, the switch was flipped and the light poured all around her.

She wasn't conscious for the snap, yet she didn't feel like she'd passed out at all. The next thing she knew, she was wrapped in blankets, on a stretcher, fingers on her wrist and a stethoscope to her chest. A light was in her eyes, a thumb pulled at her jaw, her head was turned side to side, her fingers and toes splayed out and counted. More hands gently patted her torso, even her back, perhaps feeling her spine, her ribs, her organs.

It was all a mess, a blur. Whether she saw color or not, she couldn't tell. Whether all these things were happening all at once or not, she wouldn't know. No particular smell came to mind when she tried to recollect those seconds, and no voices pierced the veil around her brain. Eventually, she was carried out of the room, through the halls, and into an ambulance.

Consciousness didn't stick around for nearly as long as it had when she had been turned into a cat. Perhaps there had been too much adrenaline then, perhaps that explained why she had been so knocked out once she finally stood still. Perhaps they were returned to the world in their new bodies with a net zero calories in their system, blood barely oxygenated, or...

She lost track of her thoughts quickly, before they even left the elevator. But even in those last seconds of consciousness, taking in the lights and interiors of the building, eyes roaming strange faces and trying to pick up on all the voices, until the instant she passed out, she kept looking for Miku.

Luka woke up to voices. Hushed whispers, barely recognizable, if it weren't for the fact that she had heard those voices all of her life. She had grown up with them, grown up surrounded by them, supported, helped, encouraged, raised by them.

When that penny dropped, the rest of her world became crystal clear. Like waking up from a particularly heavy nap, it was all immensely foreign to her at first. Everything was so heavy. She had no idea what time it was, how much of it had gone by. Her location was a mystery, and whether she was safe or not was a pressing question.

She couldn't see anything, even as she moved about. Moving her head first, huge, heavy, like a bowling ball, it rolled to and fro, supported at the back of her head, resting huge and massive on a pillow. As it rolled, her ears touched the textile of the pillowcase, she felt her hair against her cheeks, but there was something else there, a binding, it gently pressed against her face. A blindfold.

The panic was short-lived. First, her body tensed. A huge body, a tall one, her feet so far away. Every limb in between, every body part, they were like lead, impossibly large, impossibly heavy. Her lungs filled with air, barrels of it, and her mouth opened to cry, her throat like a tunnel, but then a hand rested on her shoulder. A touch that she recognized, for she'd felt it countless times.

"You're safe now, Luka."

The voice of her mother. She'd heard time and time again how much she sounded like her. Husky, almost too deep for a woman's voice, but with an undeniable feminine lilt and warmth.

She relaxed, her entire mass sinking into a mattress, feeling cloth rest on her, around her.

She was in a bed.

"Are you ok?" another voice asked, her father's. His voice had always stood out to her, even as a child who knew nothing about the world, for being so sweet. Even with his deep man's voice, his every sentence carried so much love for her and the whole world around him.

She nodded, blind, scared to speak. There was no pain, after all. She was only heavy. So heavy.

"We just heard that some of the others are also starting to wake up," her mother whispered. "The doctors are not sure how you will all react to being back to normal, especially the ones who were turned first... They're all facing some difficulties."

"So don't worry about speaking just yet," he added, and Luka felt his hand wrap around hers. His hand had always been so much bigger than hers, but at that moment, it felt so small. "We understand it's hard."

"The doctors aren't sure if they ought to ease you back into being human, or if sudden immersion is best," she went on. "That's why the blindfold is there."

"If you want it to go..."

She shook her head. It was all so foreign, yet so familiar. Like returning from a vacation to find out that your home had a smell, riding a bike for the first time in years, returning to a school that had the same layout but a new coat of paint. Her tongue was where it ought to be, but it felt so smooth. Her teeth were like spades, blocks, broad and wide. Her fingers were all too flexible, her limbs too long, and it was all so, so heavy. She breathed, her whole torso expanded, and it felt like her ribcage could contain the world.

"Don't worry, sweetheart," her mother whispered, and her hand was on her forehead, combing through her hair. "We're here."

Her father held her hand, her mother brushed her hair. Luka breathed, overwhelmed by her own size, the newness of her own self, and her blindfold which grew damp as she cried quiet tears.

After the initial hours of rest, there was a flurry of activity. Doctors quickly became the main subject of her return: all sorts of therapists, experts, and medical professionals. This was a particularly novel case after all, and the twenty-six ex-cats were the newest centerpoint of medical curiosity.

There was a lot of concern over how they were going to adapt to being human again. Apparently everyone had trouble with simply being a human, ranging from deteriorated fine-motor skills, walking, eating, and speech, on top of the dizzying Alice-in-wonderland feeling of gigantism and the ensuing issues with her proprioception. It had something to do with the mass to volume ratio; adapting to being a cat was easier because there was less volume, and thus less mass. Tripping and messing up every now and then had fewer consequences. However, being a human again involved a huge increase in volume and this tied into a significant increase in mass: tripping meant falling from much higher, moving meant moving far more weight over greater distances. Like using a mouse that wasn't calibrated to your tastes, it was a question of either undershooting or overshooting drastically, and the consequences could injure rather severely.

Worse yet, Luka was informed that she would most likely be the most severe case. She was the only one who had gone outside and had the double-edged luxury of moving around, getting acquainted with her new form, her new senses, and a new way of talking. Of all of her senses, only hearing would be effortless to adjust to; the blindfold was there to make sure colors wouldn't overwhelm her, and she was prevented from walking, grabbing, or moving much at all. She was encouraged to speak, but Luka found the task to be almost as difficult as speaking as a cat had been. All the lessons she had taught herself, all the new ways she'd practiced speaking out the consonants and vowels, they all came back to bite her; it was all wrong once again, and she needed to unlearn all of it.

Because of the novelty of the situation, the doctors around her had little idea of what to do. The best course of action was debated heavily, and Luka listened, unable to contribute to the conversation, while they talked about the blindfold, methods of physical therapy, speech therapy, whether she ought to be thrown in the deep end all at once, or whether a more gradual approach would be helpful. Her parents argued whenever the conversation steered more towards the purely pragmatic and started ignoring her happiness and well-being, but otherwise listened just as helplessly, unfamiliar with all the medical jargon.

No matter what the doctors argued however, Luka insisted that she be able to take the blindfold off as soon as possible. She'd had enough of a black-and-white world, and being completely blind wasn't an improvement in the slightest. They capitulated; some of the others had already taken off their own blindfolds with few consequences, but on the one condition that they did it carefully.

This meant that on the second morning after her rescue, the whole family woke up an hour before dawn. The curtains were still drawn, so as far as Luka knew, it was still completely dark in the room. In the presence of a nurse and a doctor, with her mother holding her hand, her father removed her blindfold. Even then, it took her several seconds to gather the courage and open her eyes: no light seeped past her eyelids, and she didn't know which she feared most: total blindness, or her cat vision persisting for the rest of her life.

Once she opened them, she knew immediately that the night vision was gone. She saw next to nothing in the dark room, no motion, even if she heard the scribbling on the clipboard, the rustling of clothes.

"What do you see?" the doctor asked.

Before she could reply, her eyes latched onto the light seeping in from under the door frame. Then, from under the curtains, another light bled into the room. Both were pale, more blueish lights than anything else, but once she saw those, she saw the pale expanse of her bedsheet, like a huge ghost, barely there in the dark. Then there were the darkened, white shapes of the wall and ceiling, cut apart and interrupted by the frames around her.

"Little," she said, keeping her words small. She blinked, focusing on the shapes before her, finding outlines of bodies, faces. Her father's white hair eventually jumped out from the rest, unmistakable once she could place it, and she smiled. "But I see."

As the minutes ticked on, her eyes adjusted slowly to the dark. She couldn't quite see faces, but she saw the size of the room she was in, the various furniture, the cots her parents slept in, the small suitcase of spare clothes they had brought along. The stack of envelopes waited patiently on her bedside cabinet, alongside a small clock, a tiny vase of flowers, and the fidget toys they had given her to keep her busy during the quiet hours. As they waited for the sun to rise, keeping the curtains closed and the door locked, she toyed with them, finally putting a picture to the shapes, painfully able to see exactly how dumb her hands have become. Her thumb in particular lagged behind, as the therapists had said, but it was something else entirely to see such a large part of her hand act dead, unaware, while the rest struggled to grab, twist, and turn simple gadgets.

As the sun rose, the light that bled in through the curtain increased. It wasn't entirely opaque, so soon the dark of night turned bright, and the gray world around her blushed with color. It was subtle: she first noticed that the toy in her hands was blue. But blue had been the only color she'd known for weeks. Then she looked up, saw that the curtain was yellow, dyed by the slowly rising sun.

She hadn't seen any warm color in weeks. The hint of it, the diluted presence was enough to send her to the brink of tears, barely blinking at the timid hue, but to be graced with the color of sunflowers and buttercups, the color of her favorite dress as a child, of omelets, of dry grass? She was almost breathless at such a simple thing, and she had yet to take in the rest of the space. Even in the sterile environment of a hospital room where most grays contained more blue than anything else, with blue paint and blue buttons, she could already make out the bright red hair of her mother, the shade of traffic lights, poppies, her favorite pen, lipstick; the soothing taupe shirt of her father, like the halls of the building she lived in, the brighter notes of hardwood floors, the shade of her own favorite clothes; the intense brown of the nurse's watch strap, like chocolate, the wooden surface of her desk, leather belts, her clipboard; the vibrant green buttons of the machine, like the leaves of the trees, the light of her car's fully-charged battery, fresh salad at the work cafeteria, Miku's eyes.

It was overwhelming, despite the colors being so washed-out in the low light. It was already worth going into hysterics over, but her mother held her hand, her father smiled at her, and all she did was cry with her eyes wide open, taking in the beauty of the world around her, while the nurse took notes, the sun rose, and the saturation increased. The more she looked, the more awe-struck she became, even by the intensity and variety of the color blue, which she had thought she had grown too acquainted with. The stack of envelopes was in all shades, the toys had so many different hues, and there was so much complexity in skin tone, the reflections of hair. Luka almost pulled the blindfold back on, such was the torrent of color and intensity, unlike anything she had seen in countless days, but she also couldn't bear the thought of depriving herself of the sight. It was fortunate that the sun could only rise so high, that the colors only got so bright, and it took just a little longer before the novelty faded.

It was an encouraging sign. The doctors were pleased with the results and concluded that a technique somewhere between total immersion and gradual re-education would be best. Before they would discharge her though, they wanted to do a few tests to measure her baseline capabilities so that they could keep track of her progress. So Luka was made to wait yet another few days in the hospital, free to read all the letters her friends and loved ones had written her, to fidget with her toys, and catch up with her parents between rounds of tests.

Shortly after one of these exams, where they measured her strength in every way possible, from lifting to lifting herself up, from pushing to walking to carrying, her father cleared his throat in the way that he always did right before a conversation he felt might be unpleasant, but ultimately unavoidable.

"Luka?"

She hummed in reply. She knew that she had to speak whenever possible, practice with the different charts and directions the speech therapists gave her, but it was somewhat discouraging to have so much difficulty just speaking.

"We were wondering..." her father went on. He sounded nervous, so Luka looked up at him. He was seated to her right, by the table to fidget toys and letters, while her mother had a chair to her left. Those were uncomfortable chairs, Luka had realized, but they sat in them nonetheless.

She appreciated the proximity.

He cleared his throat again, rubbed his hands together, a self-soothing motion he often resorted to whether he was starting a difficult conversation or when he was standing in line for what felt like a little too long.

He continued, saying, "We kept hearing how you might have a harder time getting back on your feet because you were the only one who got out."

"And we were wondering if, well... Were you safe?"

Luka blinked, forgetting the cube in her hands. After some flexing of her tongue, a few nervous gulps, she asked, taking far too long to pronounce the whole sentence, "What did they tell you?"

"Very little. Only that you were the one who escaped," her mother admitted.

He added, "We could only imagine, once we learned what had actually happened, how dangerous the world is out there for a cat. Even more so for a person who isn't used to being a cat."

"And while all this physical therapy is wonderful, and will help, no doubt, we were thinking of discussing, well, classical therapy."

"Psychotherapy, psychiatry..." He chuckled. "There's so many terms..."

Luka nodded. "Me and the others will meet. We will share."

"But your situation was extreme. You were out there, exposed to the elements... No?"

"No," she muttered, still shaking her head. It still felt so, so heavy on her neck. "I was ado— Ado… Home."

"Oh! So you had shelter!"

"Yes. But it was..." She trailed off, remembering how frighteningly small she had been. How the vet had pulled her limbs to his desire. How Gakupo had grabbed her by the scruff: she was sure those bruises had carried over somehow. Even more than that, she remembered the fear of the operating table.

"Oh, sweetheart..."

She'd started crying, she realized. Tears ran down her cheeks freely, and within seconds, her parents were at her sides, kneeling by her armchair.

They were so small, really.

"We can talk about it later," he assured her.

"Whenever you feel comfortable."

She clumsily wiped the tears from her face, wishing that words came to her easier. They were all there, in line, but her throat and tongue refused to shape them. After some effort, she said, "It was scary. I was very scared. But I was safe."

"You were safe?"

"Yes. Nothing bad happened," she managed, though the last word came out as one barely enunciated lump.

They both breathed a sigh of relief.

"Then I suppose we ought to send a card to whoever cared for you while you were there?" her mother asked, running her thumb over her wrist. "Perhaps they need to be updated on what happened to you?"

Luka gulped again. The way skin felt on hers was so foreign. There was no fur in the way. It was so...

She shook her head again. "Miku. She knows. She helped."

Their nervous smiles fell.

"Ms. Hatsune?"

"She knew?" he asked.

Luka nodded. "Late. The day we turned back, I told her. She got me inside. Then she left."

The parents glanced at one another. "She told us she has great respect for you," he admitted.

"She cared a lot for your well-being," she added. "You had been so respectful towards her."

She could only nod again. There was so much they still didn't know. They didn't know about the phone call, or how exactly the technician felt for her. Or how she had grown to feel for her in return, what it could mean...

"I know."

After a silence, her mother asked, "Did you want her to visit?"

"I... I do." Luka gulped. "But it is difficult. Messy."

"How so?"

She freed her hands from theirs, wringing her own fingers. They were so long and smooth and bony. The nails, broad and flat. Weapons no longer resided at her fingertips, but her opposable thumbs were infinitely more useful, if she could only remember to use them.

"I was a pet. Her pet. Her cat. Maybe now, she resents me. Or..." She swallowed, grabbing the cube again. "Or she thinks that I resent her."

He scoffed lightly. "I highly doubt that."

"It was messy," she repeated, eternities between each word. Saying the same words again helped, but only so marginally it barely mattered at all. "I was scared. I was not nice."

"Well, in hindsight, that's understandable. I think anybody would be upset at being a cat."

"No. Hine... Hi... Hindsight does not help. Even I... It's a mess."

He opened his mouth to protest, but his wife placed a hand on his shoulder.

"It's a situation unlike any other. I don't think we could ever begin to understand," she whispered to her daughter.

Luka nodded.

"Don't you worry. No matter what happens, we'll get through this."

"You're safe now, and we have your back," he added, with his soft, sweet smile.

"Let's focus on recovering, ok? Let's get you back on your feet first. Then we can worry about other people."

"Ok," she whispered.