Cat and Mouse

"Back again, I see," Wednesday murmured, cleaning her claws with her teeth. "Fourth time this week."

"Oh, hush," Pinta said, waving a tiny paw at the black cat. "You say that like you don't go back to the best places for food."

Wednesday purred. "Yes, but humans are usually happy to see me there."

Pinta sighed. They had been running into each other for weeks now, dancing around the differences between them like they weren't hereditary enemies. She didn't know why Wednesday bothered, since she clearly had an appetite and the claws and teeth of a predator. Pinta had fully expected to die the first time they crossed paths. And the second. And the third. But now the appearance of the cat beside her hardly caused her heart to jump.

"Not everyone can get along so well with humans. Mice, least of all."

"I don't know about that," Wednesday ventured. "Some humans keep mice as pets. At least that's what Fluffy said."

"Which Fluffy?" There were six different cats called Fluffy on the block, and Pinta had the displeasure of knowing each and every one of them. One, a ginger furred long hair, was responsible for the notch in Pinta's ear when she had been just too slow to dodge.

"The white one. Apartment 6."

"Oh. The lazy one." Fluffy the white wasn't that bad. He usually only tried to catch her if she was trying to steal food from his bowl. Other than that, he was the perfect picture of fat, lazy cats everywhere. "And you believe him?"

Wednesday sniffed. "My human once brought home a baby squirrel. Humans will adopt everything they think is cute."

Pinta shifted. "Well, I suppose you would know more about that than I would." The tightness in her stomach twisted painfully, reminding her why she had braved Wednesday's house rather than attempt to find something somewhere else. "May I take a piece of food?"

Wednesday stopped grooming herself and stared down at Pinta with her big golden eyes. "You may."

Pinta wasn't sure why she trusted those eyes. They were the eyes of a predator, of an enemy. She shouldn't turn her back on them, but she did. Every single time. And every single time, she survived.

She picked up the piece of cat food, a dry pebble of nutrients that would sustain her for the rest of the day. She nibbled at it, feeling it crunch under her sharp teeth and soothe the hunger she'd been feeling. Wednesday didn't have a reason to be nice to her, didn't have to pretend to be a docile and domesticated thing. Cats were hunters. They had always been hunters and they would always be hunters, and mice would always be prey.

"Do you ever wonder what it would be like if we were human?" Wednesday asked, flopping down on her side like she was less of a killer than she was.

"What do you mean?"

"What would we do if we didn't have to be enemies?"

The golden glow of Wednesday's eyes sent a shiver down to the tip of Pinta's tail. "I don't know. I suppose we wouldn't know each other."

"Why not?" Wednesday's tail lashed back and forth, a sign of idle amusement, of the desire to play. "What should we be as humans that we wouldn't know each other?"

"I don't know what humans do, Wednesday! How should I know?"

"Then how do you know we wouldn't meet?"

Pinta huffed, putting the crumb down. "You stay here. As a human, you'd probably stay here too. I go out. I go to other places and see other things. We wouldn't know each other if I was always out and you were always here."

"My human stays here most of the time. She goes out, but she always comes back. And there is another human that sometimes comes to her," Wednesday drawled. "What if we were like that?"

"Why would you want me to come?" Pinta asked, suddenly suspicious. "Is this still about us if we were human?"

"Maybe." But there's a playful, rumbling purr to it that is not entirely innocent. "Or what if you stayed?"

Pinta straightened. She wasn't one to ignore something when she knew what questions to ask. And now things were starting to make a little bit of sense. Wednesday was a great many things, but one of these things she had observed was honest. When she promised food, she gave it. When she promised safety, she provided it. Wednesday was a cat of her word, and Pinta didn't know what such strange things could mean.

"What are you saying?" she asked, brushing invisible bits of dust from her pale fur to have something to do.

"I want you to stay," Wednesday replied. Her tail had gone still, her body was relaxed, but her eyes were fixed on Pinta's oh so tiny body. "With me."

There were reasons she should say no. What if something happened? What if it was a trap? What if Wednesday had gotten Pinta to trust her just so she could eat her later?

Pinta realized with a jolt that she did trust Wednesday. They'd had this whole conversation and not once did Pinta honestly believe that Wednesday would eat her. It went against all her instincts to trust a cat, to trust her natural predator with her safety. They were two sides of something that was never meant to meet in such a genial way, and yet they had. Wednesday, large, black, and imposing, and Pinta, small, white, and eternally cautious.

If it were any other cat...

"Why me?" Pinta demanded, even as her heart hummed away in her body, fit to burst.

Wednesday sat up a bit, shifted into a more comfortable position, and dropped back down into a relaxed posture. "Why not?"

"That's not a reason. You must have a reason, or all the mice in the neighborhood would be here. All the mice in the world."

Wednesday twitched her ears. "You didn't scream."

Pinta opened her mouth to retort, but stopped, thinking back to the moment they first saw one another, how her heart had skipped several beats and she thought she was dying. It hadn't even occurred to her to scream. What would have been the point? She thought she'd been staring down the golden eyes of Death itself. What good would screaming have done?

"You didn't run either."

"I was a bit busy thinking I was dying," Pinta shot back, then flinched.

"There's that, too," Wednesday admitted. "No mouse ever got angry at me. And when you stopped trying to die, you yelled at me."

Pinta blinked. She had somehow won over a cat by yelling at it? She didn't remember exactly what she yelled. Probably something to the effect of 'stay away from me'.

"That's not how this is supposed to work," she said weakly. "You're a cat. I'm a mouse."

"You told me your name first, remember?" Wednesday blinked at her. "You said, 'My name is Pinta, and I'm leaving!'"

Pinta moaned. "Why?"

"And I said, 'My name is Wednesday, and I like you.'"

Wednesday's tail was lashing again. She was in the right position to rise into a pounce, to go hunting. But Pinta knew she wouldn't. She trusted a cat. A cat.

"Will you stay?" Wednesday asked, her full attention fixed on Pinta, but relaxed in a way cats weren't supposed to be around mice. "I'll share my food and water and everything."

"Why?" Pinta repeated.

"Because I like you. You're not a toy or a human or food, but you talk to me instead of being afraid. And," Wednesday drew herself up in a long stretch, her voice suddenly low and full of feeling, "because I do not like to share."

Pinta knew she shouldn't be comfortable with a cat standing over her. But it was Wednesday, and she knew somewhere deeper than instincts that she could trust Wednesday.

"Okay," she whispered, caught up in a feeling she couldn't name. "Okay, I'll stay here with you."

Wednesday blinked at her again slowly, her tail quivering. "Good," she replied. "Good."

Cats, Pinta knew, showed love in little ways. With sounds, with touches. But most of all, cats showed love with the way they held their bodies. And Wednesday couldn't show more love if she were screaming it from the top of her cat tree. 'Trust me,' she said with her body. 'Love me.'

And Pinta... She knew how to love more than her body had space to contain it all. Trust was the biggest part of her love, the greatest expression she could muster. Wednesday had earned her trust long ago.

"We're going to be a mess," Pinta said, reaching out a paw towards Wednesday's nose. "We might hate each other at the end."

"I don't care," Wednesday replied, leaning in until they were touching. "You're mine."

Pinta quivered as the words washed over her, a promise as heavy as life itself settling in her body. "And you're mine."