Chapter Text
"Now don't go over there, Son of Mausfänger, it's dangerous," Sister Gertrude scolded the cat she still thought of as Mausfänger's kitten, trying to urge him away from the ruins of the abbey. The curious feline arched his back and then went running back towards the convent walls. She had come out to sweep fallen leaves away from the front of the shrine, lest visitors track them inside, and Son of Mausfänger had followed her. To her knowledge the cats hadn't previously been so curious about the abbey, and they would probably go where they liked, but she didn't like to think of the cat getting trapped in the rubble or dislodging something that might fall into him and hurt him.
Andreas slept fitfully. Despite being midmorning it was still semi-dark within the ruined abbey, and the moon had been full. He had gone out to the garden last night by its light—in the rush to decide what to do about the ruined Abbey and with so many injuries, it had simply been abandoned so many years ago, and ever since he had tended it enough to have the old dropped seeds grow, just to help him have enough food. He hadn't felt up to sleeping then—some days when he lay down the faces of the dead haunted him.
He was painting them into the Dance With Death; he felt he had no choice, but that he could not do with only moonlight.
The self-imposed hermit of Kirsau stirred as he felt a weight on his chest, and a warmth. For a moment it was only a rare blissful comfort, but then wakefulness came to him and he realized it was an animal.
He had poached small animals and stolen, and he had failed everyone and for another moment the aching impulse to kill and eat rang in his head. Indeed, his stomach gurgled—he was often hungry. (Perhaps no more than he deserved after he couldn't resolve the peasants' grievances that had led to such lean tables. The events surrounding that St. John's Eve were seared into his head, the one clear period of memories since he lost August, but everything past that was blurry and dream-like, days blurring into each other like wetted ink.)
Then something ran in the rubble across the room—probably a mouse—and he became aware of the sound of purring.
This was a cat.
He always used to stop and pet the cats, and the dogs, in Tassing and even a few up here on the mountain at Kiersau. It was a habit that hadn't fully lingered into the days of his mastery—people in cities seemed to think it beneath an artist's dignity to attend to every animal, and some of the animals there weren't friendly either.
He hadn't affectionately touched a living soul—he was including animals in that—in years.
Haltingly he raised his hand, and ever so hesitantly stroked the cat's fur, from its head down onto its shoulders. It was soft and warm and the cat moved its head into Andreas's hand, seeking more affection.
He tried again, and as he withdraw his hand midway down its back he felt something wet on his face.
With his other hand, which had been somewhat more injured by the fire, he touched his cheek and realized that the cat had brought him to tears.
He'd cried a lot in the first few years, though he marked the years only by the changing seasons, and time passing mostly through the phases of the moon. But he hadn't wept in some time now, the grief having seeped into him and grown half-numb in the shadows of guilt.
Yet the cat was here and willing to touch him—even happy in the proximity—and time carried on despite his listless melancholy. Just now the days were getting shorter and the mornings growing cool, and winter would be at hand in a few months, ones which would probably feel both endless and too short if his existence here resembled the previous years.
He sat with the cat like this for some time. The winter would come, they would both grow older, he would one day finish painting into the dance all the villagers he knew had died and could countenance memorializing. He dithered, and had been for a long while, whether to include Caspar, who felt like his private failing and grief, for without him his apprentice would never have come to Tassing. He had never considered putting August there—whether it really was memorial or simply memento mori brought into immediacy, his son had never been here, and sometimes he thought no one else had felt his loss so keenly. Though of course Sabine was really the only one who had known August quite as well as he. He didn't feel that Bert and Marie belonged either—it saddened him but had hardly been his fault that they had died, and perhaps that suggested something about the nature of his addition to the painting.
And then that made him think of Klaus and little Magdalene, wasn't it?, and whether they were alive and well in Tassing. He didn't often watch for specific people on his ventures into the village, except perhaps that Grett was gone when he stole her discards.
If he could... if he did not repel the cat, and since time was passing and their deaths, too, ever nearer... was he ever going to speak to another person outside his dreams again? Would he, one day?