cheese struggles to go into honk shoo mimimi land colourised
read the literature here, pt below
im quite happy of this one ngl. maybe its the sleepiness talking but im actually rlly happy w this, so it would mean a lot if you read it and if you enjoyed it left a heart ^^ no pressure tho
wc: 1.7k
tws in tags
The way he looks at his apartment is not how most inhabitants of a home regard theirs. Every night, he’ll come back after bouncing between the three, four people he knows, and the cold silence smacks him across the face for trying to avoid it the whole day.
Earlier today, he’d paid a visit up to Flip’s for weaponry and bartering, slid them the last regular bell he had in exchange for a pistol, a clean, sleek thing, and that was the last of the Purradise stuff gone. That place was a bore. Roommates’ mess everywhere, nothing but a pillow and personal screen in Flip’s room. He’d made sure to let Flip know about the lack in the decor department.
And then he comes back to something viscerally more pathetic. Where’s all the stuff, the (admittedly very untidy) clothes strewn about, traces of actual living done in the living room?
All in a cloth bundle by the door is where. He hasn’t touched it since leaving the apartment for the first time. There’s a fine layer of dust over it, just enough to render the smooth cloth a tad fluffy.
It’s getting late, he may as well sleep to curb whatever his head’s trying to derail him with. Parents taught him as much. No, that’s not a safe line of thought to pursue, not at this hour.
The bedroom is out of the question. Its light switch, like with most Quarry Square (and possibly most Clearshore) light fixtures, is at the entrance. He doesn’t want to turn on the switch so he can navigate to the bed and then lie down for a few minutes and then get back up and then turn the light off again and then walk back. He doesn’t want to turn on any lights, full sentence. It’s bright white, unlike the soft multicolour yarn glow of home, and it casts everything in an equally ugly shade, glaring harshly off the metal bits of the walls and bed.
Night three on the couch. His back dips uncomfortably into the gap between the cushions. He shifts, finds that it’s even worse when he moves his hip into it, and settles for flopping over supine, staring at the ceiling.
The paint stares back. It’s extremely smooth of a job, devoid of any marks or patches or do-over bits. Coloured splotches start dancing over it, he loses any orientation he has on the ceiling, tries to move and ends up falling hard sideways onto the floor.
It’s really too hard to sleep in these places.
Travelling alone, one gets used to a lot, whether that be the antics of your brief companions you eventually find yourself missing as they un-stick from your journey, or to the strange new taste meowna takes on between realms, or to, in this case, the existence of a day and night. It’s inane. You’re given exactly enough time to get somewhat acquainted with the bright sky or dark gloom and then the sun moves enough to remind you of Purradise, and then the polar opposite of whatever time you were in blankets the entire setting. It drives him up the wall, the constant shifting.
There’s still too much of him left snagged behind, he can tell. Always a struggle to sleep in the too-dark or over-bright. Always a struggle to sleep in general. At night, he makes plans to buy a nightlamp or something just so he can get into the proper sleeping environment and then in the morning he wakes up tired and forgetful, and on the days he remembers he wakes up looking around the room and its blank walls stare back, a problem that a tiny piece of furniture won’t fix, so why even bother trying. The spaciousness is exacerbated by anything that acknowledges its scale.
No, he can’t even keep his eyes shut for long, there’s that bit of him again that demands to know where he is that’s so dark and when can they go back to the surface of Purradise to truly nap.
He gets up. The tile is not sunset-warmed carpet, it’s mildly cool enough to sap the heat with each step. Staggering over to the glass door of the balcony, the rubber band keeping his fluff from falling over his scar comes loose and he hisses at the rash-y feeling that immediately flares up underneath.
Click. Click. Blindly, he messes around with the latch, too drained-tired to focus his eye into darksight. Why are these made so complicated?
Annoyed, he directs a burst of meowna in its rough direction, picturing the handle of the door flicking upwards. It swings down, letting a burst of wind shove through the gap and steal what little sleepy-tiredness he’d tried to build up away. Oh, and his makeshift hair tie has been sent under the sofa by the gust. Wonderful.
The stars here are far more visible than in Purrlemeow, even when you’re sitting at the very peak and looking up. They always blended into the orange-red haze a bit back there, but here?
Night sky is pitch black, he learnt. The city, a few grey shades above it, spotting multicolour dots of neon instead of twinkling white. From this height, it’s actually not as bright as on the streets; the lamps wear steel hats, the topmost billboards dim or turn off. Most visible are the long strips of the train-track markers, a dim phosphorescent blue among the punch-greens and sharp purples.
He rests both forepaws on the railing, bleeding away even more heat. He’s tall enough to comfortably lean over for the view - well, he’d adjusted the railing to the lowest possible, the setting intended for catfolk like him, but still. Somewhere in his field of view, there’s an invisible mesh-damper net laid out to catch any that fall. Not that he would let himself. Even if the feeling would be a nice change of pace in this place (he’s too many lives to waste a single one, or something along those lines).
His paws and snout itch to do something. That part of him he genuinely wants to toss into the tracks below.
He can feel the breeze pick up again, whipping at his snout and fluff, a dash of cold comfort on his scar, if only because it gets the fur off it for a moment.
Last time he’d just stood out here until the sun had peeked over the horizon once more to his left, the shade of the sky so tantalising, so short for what it was, and then the trance had broken and left him dazed under the pale teal sky.
He could’ve stood there for ages. With his meowna stores, thirst would do him in within a few months, probably, be a decade before his lives bled to the very last, and then by that time everyone here would be gone and then that little cloth bundle would be under his cloak again and he’d be trekking through the fluffiverse for something to bat around with until his time was up, and it didn’t even seem like a bad idea for the most part, it wasn’t one new to him.
Well except now he has a slight bit tying him down but it’ll probably be gone soon, too, anyways, and he’ll wait that out because who is he to turn down such a nice spot of comfort on the road? It’ll fade out. And then he’ll keep moving.
Wow he really needs to sleep. Would be nice if the sky wasn’t so wrong!
He misses Purradise. He misses Purrlemeow. He misses being able to sneak out and clamber a little ways up the cardstone cliff faces with nothing but a short length of yarn and his boots and claws and lie in the softness of the highest part of the meowntain and doze off there if his father was being loud or unnerving or just not there. What he has on his balcony is a sad overpriced imitation of that. Opting for the balcony apartment, that’s what he regrets most.
Moonlight shines down on him, the angle sharper than before. He needs to sleep or tomorrow will be a slog, and tomorrow is actually something important because he’s going to be giving or doing or executing one of Flip’s errands for him (or was it an errand of his own, or did he delegate someone to come with him? His brain feels like it’s drowning, it’s a white blur of noise not thought now) with Sickle.
Speaking of that absolute cipher of a man. He grabs his phone and presses down on the first name.
can you run to an all hours furniture store and portal over one of those “lava lamps” thanks. He sends his phone into the soft bit of the sofa back as soon as he accidentally not accidentally hits send. He’s never as funny as he thinks he is when tired. Except when smashed.
Crawling back over, he retrieves the phone which is miraculously untouched. The message has been seen. No reply, despite ten whole minutes (he watches. He counts.) of the little bubble indicating typing.
A few seconds later the couch disappears into the Soup (Sickle-coined term, of course) of an appearing portal and out pops a familiar lava lamp. It’s the pink one he sees the most, not the green one he’d have expected Sickle to give him, not that he’d expected anything really but if anything surely not the main centrepiece of his desk.
His shoulders fall instantly and he slumps back against the glass door and just breathes, a proper inhale he lets his whole chest move with, and just stares at the lamp, really takes it in, the blobby bits of light and the slowly swaying shadows it casts.
And despite the cold floor he’s left with he sleeps better than he has in ages.
