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Mick is not unfamiliar with longing.
Staring out to sea is, one might even say, a known pastime of his.
So what if he has a new aching empty space. What’s one more in his collection?
So sometimes he’ll just sit and stare at the empty dome where the stone bear used to sit.
The bell rings, and Mick is confronted with the sight of Crystal Palace in his shop.
She comes straight to the desk, beverage in hand, wafting the scent of coffee and sugar.
“Thought the Agency was relocating back to London,” Mick says.
“The Dead Boys have a new case over there,” Crystal explains, “but I’m still working on something here.”
Her eyes turn to the empty dome and she sips her drink.
It's some kind of frothy coffee concoction, probably full of sugar syrups, topped with whipped cream and filaments of caramel, covered by its own little plastic dome. It feels like a mockery.
“You haven’t moved this, have you?” she asks, gesturing at the dome.
“Nope,” Mick says.
“Can I open it?” She raises her eyebrows at him.
Mick tells her, “No.”
She narrows her eyes at him for a moment, then says, “You gave her that bear for a reason. What was it?”
“Because sometimes we expect the worst,” Mick says, “but hope still won’t die.”
“Yeah,” she agrees. Her eyes linger on the glass dome.
He knows the look in her eyes, the haunted look of not recognizing home til it’s been left behind.
Mick sees The Cat King from time to time, when he’s out and about. That cannery down by the docks is hard to avoid if you’re the kind who’s always combing the beach for little treasures, sea glass or prophecies or anything you can sell.
The sea is dark today, black like a void, an empty space where he used to belong. The seagulls shout at each other about their own kind of treasures, washed up creatures or potato chips, discarded things.
Mick is a discarded thing.
Animal gods can be a lot of ways. They can be tyrannical. They can be indifferent and cold. The Cat King, though, no one can say the Cat King doesn’t take care of his cats. Protect them. Check in on them.
It’s a much smaller realm than the sea, though.
Mick had had the freedom of the whole ocean and the protection of Sedna, and he still hadn’t been satisfied.
He’s been outside looking in, ever since.
He’s outside looking in on the realm of the Cat King, right now, as he comes up the beach to see the Cat King freeing one of his cats from a tangle of fishing line.
“You’ve got all this magic,” Mick comments to him. “All these sparks and flashes. And here you are, getting your hands dirty doing things the human way.”
“Ah, that’s where you’ve got it wrong,” the Cat King says with a broad grin. “Changing forms is my most powerful ability. Having hands is the magic.”
Mick sits down heavily on a nearby rock and stares at his own hands.
“You want mine?” Mick asks. “I’d trade ’em in in a heartbeat.”
“Not my department,” the Cat King says ruefully. “Ah!” He slips the cat free of the last of the fishing line, and it starts preening its fur with an air of nonchalance. “I’d take another pair of hands, to take care of my kingdom with, but they’re no use to me without a brain attached.”
“I’m not one of your subjects,” Mick says.
“Isn’t that what I just said? You’re not my department.” The Cat King looks at him speculatively. “But there’s no reason I can’t have allies, is there?”
Mick thinks about that.
The Cat King is dangerous, all animal gods are, but he’s also fair, and gives a lot of second chances.
And Mick can’t help but think of the careful, gentle way he’d untangled that line from his cat.
It’s tempting.
“I’m still Sedna’s,” he says. “I’m going to get back to her.”
“But in the meantime?” the Cat King asks.
Mick turns his eyes to the sea.
The whole town smells of the sea, smells of Sedna’s salt tears.
“I can’t take that step,” he says. It would mean straying from the precarious balance he’s been keeping with himself. He’s been walking on the edge of something and it’s a fall either way.
That’s what hope is, he supposes. A balancing act.
On one side is despair, on the other is moving on.
Mick doesn’t want either of those.
So he stands still. And he hopes.
The next day, the Cat King walks into his shop.
He stalks through the aisles, hunting for something. Makes a little pleased noise, and comes to the front with a little unlabeled bottle that Mick can’t actually remember seeing before.
“What is that?” Mick asks.
“Hoping you could tell me,” the Cat King says. “Smells interesting, though.” He leans on the counter and brandishes the little bottle.
Mick hesitates before he takes it from the Cat King’s hand. Most customers just put things on the counter.
He pries out the ancient cork stopper and holds the bottle under his nose. Catmint, borage, dandelion, and… ah. “Potion of clairvoyance,” Mick tells him.
“I’ll take it,” the Cat King says.
“That'll get you mighty gone,” Mick warns him.
“What’s wrong with that?” the Cat King asks with a smirk and a shrug.
“No control? Vulnerability?” Mick winces. “I don’t understand how people can enjoy that.”
“Well,” says the Cat King with a wink, “it really depends who you’re with.”
Mick has no idea how to respond to that.
Which is when Crystal walks in again.
Walking straight to the desk to stare at the empty dome.
“You’re back again,” Mick says.
“I can’t just give up,” she responds absently, eyes still locked on the empty space.
Mick sympathizes. He can’t even imagine what giving up would look like, himself.
“No coffee this time?” he asks.
“Oh, I finished it already,” Crystal tells him. “Seemed like you didn’t like me bringing them into the shop.”
“I didn’t say that,” Mick protests. Today she’s alone, hands empty. That doesn’t seem right.
She gestures to the glass dome.
“Can I open it?” she asks again.
“No.”
The Cat King hums curiously. “You’re trying to find your friend Niko?” he asks Crystal.
“I’ll find her,” Crystal says stubbornly.
“That's a dangerous business for a human,” the Cat King says, like he wants it to sound offhand. It doesn’t. “Even one who’s a powerful psychic.”
“I don’t care.”
“And even if you survive,” the Cat King warns, “you might end up disappointed.”
“Don’t even say that,” Crystal hisses poisonously.
“Believe me,” the Cat King says,“there are realms out there that we can’t follow people to, as much as we’d like to. She might be alive. She might be so different you wouldn’t even recognize her if you saw her. Sometimes the universe is cruel like that.”
Crystal lashes out. “Why the fuck are you trying to talk me out of this?” she asks, poking the Cat King in the chest with one emphatic finger. “You know how much Edwin cared about her. He hasn’t been the same since she died.”
“Well, maybe I think enough of his friends are dead already,” the Cat King snaps back. “I don’t want to watch him lose you, too.”
They’re like, well. Two angry cats. Sparks flying. Except these two are both full to the brim with magic, magic that is woven into their very souls.
Why is it always magic that catches Mick’s eye? Magic is twisty and treacherous.
That’s why he keeps all of it he can find, close, under his eye. So he can keep watch for trouble.
Trouble, these two certainly are.
He wants to know how this ends. So he doesn’t kick them out of his shop.
“You don’t understand,” Crystal says, fist balling in the fabric of the Cat King’s shirt. “I wanted to be a better friend. For her, starting with her. And I didn’t even get the chance.”
“Yeah, well,” the Cat King says with an unhappy little laugh, “trying to keep new friends close with magical means has not worked especially well for me.”
“Then what good are you!” Crystal roars, leaning in.
The Cat King laughs, dark and knowing. “Who said I was good?”
There’s a long moment where they stare at each other, Crystal glaring, the Cat King meeting her gaze steadily, Crystal’s fingers clenched in his shirt.
Mick wishes he’d kicked them out.
He flips through his paperback, pretending to read.
“I don’t want to forget,” Crystal says, shaking her head. “I don’t want to forget what we lost and the fact that we don’t know where she is or if she needs help. But I need to forget for just a minute or I am going to go out of my fucking mind.”
The Cat King’s tone goes low as he says, “If you’re asking for my help with that…”
Crystal lunges for him and crushes his mouth in a kiss. He responds with equal enthusiasm.
Fuck, Mick wishes he were anywhere else. Unfortunately, this is his shop.
Mick clears his throat and they jump apart.
“Right,” says the Cat King hoarsely. “Come back to mine?”
“Why the hell not,” Crystal says.
Mick very carefully does not watch them as they head out, but he hears the bell of his door.
What was that?
The way the Cat King’s hands had gently cupped Crystal’s head—
It’s like he actually cares about her, or something.
It’s not any of Mick’s business anyway.
But still—
Does he mean it? When he flirts, when he says the things he does?
When he flirts with Mick?
The Cat King flirts with a lot of people. Mick has come to the conclusion that it’s a quirk of his personality, something he does automatically.
Why would anyone flirt with Mick, and mean it?
Mick. The empty void where a walrus used to be.
So Mick always thought of the Cat King’s flirtation as window dressing. An empty gesture with nothing behind it.
Is there something real there to be had, after all?
Not that it would matter. Diving into something with someone would mean taking a step back from the sea. And Mick just can’t bring himself to do that.
Because of this goddamned lingering hope that clogs up his brain and whispers sweet memories to him.
Mick is a whole fucked up mess of used-to-be-walrus. There’s no use in him getting attached to anything about life on the land.
The bell rings again.
It’s them, both of them. It’s only been a few hours.
“Why are you two here again?” Mick asks tiredly.
“I had an idea,” the Cat King says.
His pupils are blown with the effects of the potion.
“And you had to rush out of bed like that to come and test it?” Crystal asks him with a smirk.
“Please,” the Cat King says to her. “As if you’d ever forgive me if I did anything else.”
“Thank you,” Crystal says quietly.
There’s tenderness there. Something real and achingly delicate in the way the Cat King looks at her. The way he cradles her face as he leans in for a kiss.
“Why are you here?” Mick interrupts them.
“I did say I had an idea,” the Cat King says.
“What was the idea?”
“So,” says the Cat King, turning the wide, gold-rimmed darkness of his eyes on Mick, and Mick has a feeling of foreboding. “The bear is connected to Niko,” the Cat King says. “The bear is connected to you. Maybe you’re the missing piece. Maybe you can help us find her.”
“I can’t,” Mick says automatically.
“What, just like that?” Crystal protests. “We haven’t even figured out what that might mean. And you just say you can’t?”
“I just can’t,” Mick says.
“Why not?” she persists.
Mick’s eyes go to the dome.
The empty place where the bear used to be is a quiet little sacred spot.
One blessing from Sedna. And one memory of a girl who asked about his story and really listened.
Both gone.
A silence that should not be broken. It would be like laughing during an elegy.
He doesn’t want to disturb the moment trapped inside the glass dome. Doesn’t even want to breathe, for fear of unbalancing it.
Tipping over his carefully balanced hope.
“What if we don’t find her?” Mick mutters. “What if we look, and there’s nothing there.”
“You’re afraid to look,” Crystal accuses.
Mick can’t really argue with that.
He’s terrified.
“Well get over yourself,” Crystal says, her tone hard. “We need your help.”
Mick sets his jaw.
“Hey now,” says the Cat King to Crystal. “Let me talk to him. Okay?”
Crystal sighs, but she steps aside, pulling out her phone.
“Mick,” the Cat King says, coming around the counter, stepping close. “You’ve got to get out of this rut.”
His eyes are still blown huge, and Mick can’t decide whether it makes him look like a focused, stalking cat more than a floppy, drugged one. Either way, he seems transfixed by Mick.
“No,” says Mick. “My rut is just fine.”
The Cat King keeps looking at him, and Mick abruptly remembers it’s primarily a potion of clairvoyance. The Cat King might’ve taken it recreationally, but that doesn’t mean he won’t see things.
Softly but pointedly, the Cat King leans in and says, “You’re rotting.”
Mick resents being examined like this. “So leave me to rot!”
“Fuck.” The Cat King closes his eyes for a moment. “I can’t do that, Mick,” he says.
“Why not?” Mick asks, a little sharply. “You always have before.”
The Cat King looks down at his own hands.
“Well, I guess I died and I came back as someone different,” he says.
The black cat has been more somber, more soft than the gold-ginger maned beast he was before, it’s true.
But it doesn’t make a difference. “I just do what I need to do,” Mick tells him. “To hold on to my hope.”
“Is it really hope if it paralyzes you like this?” the Cat King asks, those huge eyes pinned on Mick again. “Or is it just clinging to an empty shell that used to have hope living in it?”
Mick can’t answer that. He feels pinned in place, examined.
“Niko was brave in a way some of us just can’t be,” the Cat King says. “It’s okay if you can’t do this. But I always wondered. What are you standing still for?”
By the end of the sentence, the Cat King is holding Mick’s face with all the tenderness he bestowed on Crystal.
It has to be the potion.
“You were never this sweet,” Mick objects.
“I told you. I came back as someone different.”
The Cat King’s finger runs along the edge of his jaw, inviting him, without force, to come closer.
Mick doesn’t have it in him to resist, this human body gets so cold and the Cat King radiates warmth.
The kiss is impatient, and just a little demanding.
The Cat King’s breath, the Cat King’s mouth, hot, mammalian, hungry, alive, with predator’s teeth, breaks something open. Mick is—
Oh no, he’s losing his equilibrium, tipping over, skewing to one side.
Oh no, he’s alive!
This wasn’t supposed to be life, he couldn’t let himself make a life here!
The Cat King pulls back, wiping away Mick’s tears. “Hey. Hey. What’s wrong?” he asks.
“I don’t know how to do this,” Mick says. “I don’t know how to be human.”
“You’re no more human than I am,” the Cat King offers, laughter in his voice.
“To be whoever this makes me, then.”
“I can help you,” says the Cat King. “I can help you figure out what to do when you wake up and realize you’re someone different than you were.”
Mick’s head is swimming with all the things that are changing. He remembers something important.
“What about Crystal?” he asks.
The Cat King grins. “I’m sure she’s got some tips of her own on that count,” he says.
“No, I mean.” Mick gestures vaguely. “You and her.”
“It’s got nothing to do with you and me,” the Cat King insists.
“You gonna argue with that?” Mick asks Crystal.
Crystal purses her lips thoughtfully. “I mean,” she says, “I don’t have anything against the two of you being a couple. But I don’t want to join in with you in bed, no offense, so yeah, separate sounds good to me.”
Mick laughs incredulously. “That wasn’t what I was getting at, but good to know,” he says.
Crystal inclines her head. “Well, I’ve been the jealous bitch, yeah. But he has a point. I’ve left that version of myself behind. And anyway, I’m pretty over the whole ‘guy who’s deeply and worryingly obsessed with me’ phase. I’d kinda like to give this whole ‘guy who likes me, sure, but has other things going on too’ thing a shot.”
“Huh,” Mick says.
“Come back to mine,” the Cat King says, throwing one arm around each of them. “Both of you. We’ll have dinner.”
“Sounds good, what do you think?” Crystal asks.
Against every habit Mick has screaming at him to say no, he says “Yes.”
The thing about spending time with the Cat King and Crystal Palace is that they both have this zest for life.
They eat decadent food. They please their bodies, their own and each other’s.
They live where they are, in the here and now, enjoying it to the utmost.
They don’t like waiting on emptiness. They’d rather fill it with something.
So, slowly, Mick learns to fill his moments. Lets himself live, lets himself want things he can have.
And soon there’s a moment where he can face that uncertainty, the spot of possibility lying under that dome.
Mick opens up the empty glass dome. Brushes his fingers over the spot where Sedna’s last blessing had rested for so long.
Lets himself breathe.
And falls forward into whatever comes next.