Katpride
Story Collector
v v v_v v v v_v v v v v_v v v v_v v v
When Adelyn collapses at last, exhausted, into her bed (her grandparents’ guest bed), when she closes her eyes and lets the whirr of the fan lull her into the soft arms of sleep, she finds that there is a panther waiting for her, in her dreams.
Its fur is sleek and dark and it is warm, living-warm, life-warm, the kind of all-encompassing warmth that suffuses through her whole being even though it is only laying across her shins, even though she only has one hand tangled in the fur around its neck.
She blinks only once, sleepy and slow, the girl-who-is-a-panther looking down at the cat laid across her legs, and when she opened her eyes she was the panther-who-was-a-girl, curled in the lap of the girl-who-was-she, looking up at herself.
Her face was fuzzy, almost, indistinct in the way that a half-remembered stranger’s might be. She knew the curve of her jaw, the soft flare of her nose, the shape and startling lack of color of her eyes, and she could focus on any one of these and see, with the panther’s eyes, that her features were indeed hers, and they were in the right places and had the right shapes, but then her gaze would shift, and the fuzziness would creep into her peripherals again. Her hair was less staticky, and she let her eyes rest on the black - no, speckled white - no, black - for a hazy minute before realizing, with a muted, slow-surfacing surprise, that her ears were stubborn voids of static, flickering too fast to make out more than fleeting glimpses of fur, skin, nothing, fur - different fur, she thought, two different shades, two different shapes, one familiar, one not.
She was too tired to make sense of it, so she let her eyes drop half shut, let her head droop into her lap. The hand-that-was-hers-and-its scratched behind her ears, and it felt familiar, somehow.
The panther was tired too, she realized, then, as she relaxed and felt herself sink further into its mind. It had been awake just as long as she had. Which made sense, because it was her, and she was it.
What was that?
The panther blinked its eyes, slow and deliberate, and Adelyn is cast back into her own head. She tries to blink again, but nothing happens, and so all she can do is stare down at the animal on her lap, at the predator with its sheathed claws and silky fur. She keeps petting it, and a purr rumbles its way through its throat. The purr seems to shake her to her bones, soft and soothing for all that it makes her skeleton buzz, and her eyelids feel heavier by the moment.
Thank you, she thinks, or maybe says, as her eyes finally slip shut and the darkness comes to claim her. Soft fur brushes against her face, and as she sinks into it she thinks she hears her voice echo.
^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^
She takes a day to recover, to laze about and do nothing as the hours tick by. Then her grandma sits her down and makes her call her parents, tells her that they’re worried sick, that they need to hear from her or they’ll be knocking at the door by tomorrow evening. Tells her that they can be knocking at the door tomorrow evening, if she needs that.
She takes the phone and tells them everything. Well, no, not everything. But close enough to it that she feels a weight lift off her chest, one she’s glad to be rid of. And she tells them that she’ll be okay, really, without them, that they should really finish the roofing before the storm hits in a few days, and they can visit after.
(She isn’t sure, exactly, what happens at the end of the call - there’s some shuffling, and muffled voices, and when her dad says goodbye there’s a kind of ‘secret surprise’ tone in his voice that makes her suspicious. But she lets them go, and when the line finally drops she sags into the back of the couch, exhausted again despite only having been up for a few hours.)
v v v_v v v v_v v v v v_v v v v_v v v
Her grandpa looks like he wants to talk to her. She tries to find the focus to listen, she really does, but her mind is elsewhere, wandering and wondering how she’s going to deliver on her promise to Sam.
(She has an idea. It’s something that Todd mentioned once, funnily enough. But she still remembers -
(“Oh, honey, you didn’t have to do that.” (and she sounded like she might cry, her mother, as she pulled her close and ran a hand over her hair, hesitating almost to a standstill at the soft brush of fur from her new ears.) “Next time, you talk to me first, alright? That’s… a big change. You have to think about it first, understand?”)
- and so she stalls. She has to think about it first.)
^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^
She’s thought about it. She’s thought about it so much that she’s dreamt about it -
(“Are you sure?” The panther asked, and its voice was her mother’s, and hers, and its own, three shades of the same question, each skewing it differently. She looked back at it, little girl-thing with its eyes, its fur, (its ears and paws, though not quite a matching set yet). And then she tilted her head down, frowned, and said nothing. It was not denial, but it was not acceptance. And so the panther did nothing.)
- and even though she hasn’t talked to her mother about it (hasn’t talked to anyone about it) she knows what she has to do.
v v v_v v v v_v v v v v_v v v v_v v v
Early in the morning, on the fourth day, before either of her grandparents are awake, Adelyn stands in front of the bathroom mirror, the counter under her hands holding her up where her injured foot falls short.
She takes a good long look at her face. Her eyes (its eyes) (her mother’s eyes) stare back at her, blank white and accusing.
She blinks. Her eyes stare back at her, determined and stubborn and - accepting.
She smiles, a hard smile that would’ve been foreign on the face of the girl she was a year ago. (Maybe even a few months ago.) And when she falls into the power thrumming under her skin, the soft brush of fur rising up to greet her feels familiar. She reaches not for the Shift, not for the nebulous cloud of possibility that still waits just past her claw-tips, but for a more familiar friend.
^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^
(The panther gave her what she asked for. It would always give her what she asked for, if it was within its power to grant.)
(Lucky for it that all she asked for was more of itself. It gave her that, and in the rush of transformation it scraped its sandpaper tongue over her foot (its foot) and took the injury away from her, into itself, into nothing and everything (but mostly nothing, for now). It was the least it could do.)
(All things considered, it thought her new nose looked rather striking. The stripe of dark fur in the center of her face really highlighted the whites of her eyes and teeth. It rumbled its approval of its girl-who-was-it, and from the way her head tilted, her eyes widened, it almost thought she might have heard it properly this time.)
Last edited: