#fefetaroxy

Cats and fish both, Roxy knows like the back of her hand. Her entire life up until the game had been cats, carapaces, and the endless ocean.

Sometimes when she first woke up, and tried to walk across her Land, she tripped headlong into the ground because her legs were sealegs, always had been. Fefeta helped her stand up, and explained in a voice full of rolling r's and half swallowed vowels that, "Walking on land is all about lines and angles, pouncing from point A to point B without stopping to breathe! Land doesn't change just beclaws you step on it. It's strrronger than that!"

When she had collapsed in the kitchen, blubbering aimlessly about the fact that no one was ever going to love her, Janey obsessing over Jake, and Dirk being gayer than the neon rainbow sky, and Jake being some kind of special, delusional geek, and Callie gone away where no one even knew, the voice Fefeta used was a warbling thing, watery in a way that was absent of tears. Air hissing out between syllables like silent h's, volume rising and falling like the tide.

"People," she had said, "are kinda seally aboat romance, but just because they're all tangled up in their own nets doesn't mean they don't still love you! I'll take care of you until they figure it out!"

When Fefeta exploded, there was no one to take care of Roxy. Jane was furious, and then there was the prison, the pumpkins, the sugar high from hell, the fighting, the fighting, the fighting. 

And then, it was over, and Roxy barely knew what to do with herself.

It was done. There were a good thirty-two bodies sprawled out on the ground, every one of them heaving for breath on grass that was just blue enough to remind Roxy of the ocean, of home. 

She was the first one to start laughing, the horror of the end of existence draining out of her, and leaving behind an emptiness so light she thought she might float off, like she had when she was dreaming.

Soon enough, other voices joined hers, giggles and chuckles and hysterical crowing.

"Rrroxy!" The voice was unfamiliar, high and rasping, reminiscent of her cats. But the R's were too long, and the vowels too short, and the body that pounced into her side was all angles and straight lines, moving too quick to stop for breath. 

"You did it! You won! W----E won!" That one was too low, smooth and slick, but hair still hissed out around the edges of too many teeth, volume sliding up like crashing waves with excess exuberance, and the arms that wrapped around her chest were soft and slow, an embrace as inexorable and unhurried as the tide pushing up against her floating home.

"That's p weird, you know?" Roxy managed, once all the pieces fell into place.

"We know!" They chimed together, their accents clashing horribly, but there at last was the voice of her dear, dear sprite. In stereo now, but otherwise unchanged.

"It's not a purrrroblem though. Is it?" Nepeta's words are careful and quiet in a way that feels unnatural, even though Roxy isn't sure she's in a position to judge that.

"We're still," Feferi starts, before her own voice bubbles off into silence. She tries again. "Did they ever get untangled?"

Other little groups of people are starting to pick up their own 'oh thank god, we aren't dead' conversations, and when she hears Jake's ridiculously fake accent Roxy feels a little guilty that she hadn't even thought to check on everyone else first. Had just broken into hysterics and let herself be tackled by catfish girls.

But if that's not a. A perchfectly pawbvious explanation of her priorities, then she'll eat someone's rumpled hat.

"Man, they're never gonna get untangled, but whatever. I got my own nets now."