a meowment in time (closed @ katsura, event oo7)
She’d been caught in the rain that morning - an expedition of the city gone off, plans bursting the same way the clouds had just around lunchtime. The lieutenant had wanted to supplement her vague memories of her first few days with an understanding of her home, even if it still made something in her cringe to call it so. She didn’t have much else to call home, though Shizume (or parts of it) remained somewhat familiar. Neither her presumed place of origin nor her current residence truly spoke to her anymore. In fact, very few people did, and that hadn’t surprised Seri either, considering her ailment didn’t seem to be a singular upheaval.
Rather, she’s seen plenty of faces as quizzical as hers pacing through the city, leaning under overhangings to avoid the occasional burst of further rain, or otherwise not caring to be bothered by it at all. Even with the coat she’d been given to draw over her other civilian clothes (another meager blessing, too, to see them hung next to her uniform in her slim closet), the day had seemed less hopeful than she’d ever anticipated upon waking…and her hopes hadn’t been very high to begin with.
Seri’s paces through the city of the afternoon are slower than they’d been at the start of the day, with less decisive gall when choosing which street to move down next. Her wooden sword hardly makes her feel safe - but she does feel some small security in the fact that they hadn’t curbed her Aura entirely.
Seri draws her coat closer. She exhales. And just then -
Something runs over her leg, the surprise instant as Seri feels rain-speckled fur glaze atop her skin, just above the hem of her sock. Her recoil transmutes to more of a stuttering split in stance once Seri recognizes the blur of tortoiseshell as not a rat or some other kind of vermin (which she might expect, she hears, within certain other districts of the city), but a shivering feline, fur streaked with russet and face entirely black save for a trickle of what is neither brown, nor white, nor tawny, but stark rubble grey, as though its movements haven’t been quite as sleek as usual.
As though it’s had reason to fall, catching its nose on the loose pavement - and this, perhaps, makes Seri angry in a way she can’t quite explain or justify with proper memory.
The shouts of children rise from the same alley the kitten had come from, too playful to insinuate much until they round the corner and Seri finds her lips pursing into a startled grimace.
"Stop!" she says, with all the authority of her rank. The cat startles at the sound.
"Stop!" she says again, less effective this time, as un-hearing, petty smiles wind their way across young faces.