#mr kitty

and when something does wander too close, some skittering awful thing that got brave or got lost, he doesn't fight it where you can see. he presses stay here, little one, stay in your room into your mind and it's so gentle you almost don't notice the command buried inside the request. and then he's gone. and then he's back. and he never tells you what happened but his hello kitty apron is on crooked.

"did you miss me while i was gone? tell me honestly" and he already knows. he's telepathic. but he wants to feel you think it. wants to catch the shape of it in your head, the warm animal relief of you're back. he asks so he can sit inside that feeling for a second. press it between his long fingers like a flower he wants to keep.

you are the only thing in his collection that he didn't have to find. you just showed up, stumbled through a door or maybe you were delivered injured to him, and he stood over you and sent safe now, safe here, you're safe until you believed it.

and the thing is. you ARE safe. that's not a lie. that's never been a lie.

you just might not be free.

but he'd let you go if you asked. he would. he'd hate it, you'd feel the grief of it rolling off him in long slow waves, but he'd step aside.

you just have to want to walk out into the dark more than you want to stay in the warm golden light of a window that looks out on a place that never existed.

you drop onto the spare bed he keeps for you in the corner. it has a pillow. a blanket. both pink. both clean. he made this bed for you after your third visit, when you'd fallen asleep on his floor and he'd apparently decided this was unacceptable hospitality.

"different how?" you ask, pulling the blanket over your legs.

brighter. more layered. a pause. the psychic equivalent of squinting. there's a secondary harmonic in your base frequency that wasn't there last month. faint. intermittent. it spikes when you're distracted. another pause. longer. it smells like level 0.

you scowl.

ah, mr kitty drawls with the psychic weight of a creature that's just solved a puzzle. I see.

"you don't see anything," you gripe. "you don't have eyes."

I see plenty. for instance, I see that your scent profile has shifted. there's a mineral undertone that doesn't belong to you. old. cold. deep-level. the faceless head tilts further. someone's been getting close to you.

"another entity has been—" you search for the right word. "annoyingly persistent."

the silence that follows has a flavour to it. rich. warm. deeply, insufferably amused.

annoyingly persistent, mr kitty repeats, his psychic voice doing something that would be a grin if he had a mouth. and this annoyingly persistent entity... would he happen to be very old? very territorial? known for changing shape? the first thing the walls ever produced perhaps?

you pull the blanket higher. "I don't want to talk about it."

the shape changer. the old one. mr kitty sets down his book, his full attention on you now, which is a lot of attention from a seven-foot psychic. the smart humans call him entity 0. and he's chasing you.

you scoff. "he's bothering me."

he's courting you.

you bristle with outrage. "he is not—"

your frequency spikes every time I mention him. you're doing it right now. and your scent. mr kitty leans back in the armchair. you're thinking about him. at this exact moment. the thought is changing your scent and your base frequency in real time. I can feel the secondary harmonic getting louder.

your face is hot. your borrowed skin is betraying you in a way you can't quite control. "that's.... a human response. from the borrowed body. it doesn't mean—"

it means exactly what it means. you're responsive to him. your frequency reaches for his even when he's not present. your body is producing bonding pheromones. a beat. the way mates do.

"we are not mates." you sit up, your clicking going sharp with outrage. "he is a territorial, insufferable, cocky, infuriating—"

you're describing a mate.

"i'm describing a nuisance."

these are often the same thing.

you throw your pillow at him. he catches it. telepathically. the pillow hangs in the air between you for a second before gently floating back to the bed. you grab it and hug it to your chest, scowling openly at the wall.

mr kitty's amusement radiates through the room like warm light. i've known entity 0 for a very long time. longer than you've been alive, which is admittedly not a high bar. he has never, in all those centuries, shown interest in another entity. not the facelings, not the skin-stealers, not the things in the deep levels. none of them. and now he's chasing a newborn through his own corridors and rearranging exits and wearing a human shape he built from scratch. a pause. for you.

"he's a predator. it's hunting behaviour."

if he wanted to hunt you, you'd be dead. he's three thousand years old. you're eleven months. the fact that you're still alive and he's still chasing means the chase is the point, not the catching. the head tilts. he's playing with you, and you're playing back.

your displeased clicks saturate the air. "I am not playing—"

you ran past his territory border four times last week. you could have avoided level 0 entirely. you chose to cross within range of his frequency and then you ran. the psychic equivalent of a raised eyebrow. that is textbook invitation behaviour.

your clicking goes rapid and embarrassed. you bury your face in the pillow.

I don't say this to embarrass you, mr kitty adds, gentler now. the amusement softening into something warmer. I say it because you deserve to know what's happening to you. your frequency is changing. your scent is changing. your body is preparing for a bond whether your conscious mind has agreed to it or not. and the entity your body has chosen is not a small thing. he's the oldest. the most powerful. and he's obsessed with you in a way i've never seen him obsessed with anything.

silence. your face still in the pillow.

"he's very annoying," you mumble.

yes.

"he pins me to walls."

I gathered.

"he tried to ask me my name and when I wouldn't tell him he said he'd just call me 'pretty' until I gave him a better option."

... and what did you say?

"I bit his throat," you admit with a small huff. "ripped a chunk out."

a long pause. mr kitty's frequency does the psychic equivalent of a slow blink.

and he's still chasing you.

"he's still chasing me."

you ripped his throat out and he's still chasing you. and you're here, in my guest bed, thinking about him so loudly I can taste it from across the room. another pause. you're both hopeless. I want you to know that.

you snort. "shut up."

come here, little one.

you don't want to move from the bed, but his frequency is warm and steady, familiar in all the best ways, and you've had a long week of running from the oldest thing in the backrooms and pretending the running isn't foreplay.

so you drag the blanket off the bed and cross the room, curling up at his feet with your head against his knee, the way you've done a dozen times before. his large hand (too many fingers, too many joints, but gentle, always gentle) rests on your head.

you're quiet for a while. his frequency humming around you. calm and safe and free of agenda. the pink walls. the hello kitty figurines in their neat rows. the hand-drawn SAFE ZONE sign. this space he built for creatures that need rest.

"thank you," you say quietly, shyly. "for letting me stay here. for the bed. for the food, back when I was new. you didn't have to be kind to me."

kindness isn't transactional.

"it is for most entities."

i'm not most entities. his thumb traces a slow circle on the top of your head. and neither are you. that's why I like you. you protect wanderers. you guide them to safe exits. you fight things twice your size to keep fragile creatures alive. most entities see humans as food or entertainment. you see them as people worth saving.

your clicking goes soft. the comfort frequency.

"I just don't think they should die here," you say quietly. "nobody deserves to die somewhere this lonely."

the weight behind the words lands in the quiet room. mr kitty's hand stills on your head, his psychic field pressing gently against your frequency, feeling the shape of the grief underneath the sentence without looking at it directly. he never looks directly. that's why you trust him.

you're always welcome here, he says. whenever you need rest. whenever the chasing gets too much. whenever the old one does something that makes you confused or frightened or angry. the bed is yours. the food is yours. the quiet is yours.

"and the stickers?"

the stickers are negotiable. a pause. but yes. the stickers are also yours.

you smile against his knee. close your eyes. let the warm, safe quiet of level 974 settle around you.

his hand resumes its slow circles on your head.

he'll be good for you, mr kitty says quietly. almost to himself. if you let him. he'll be good for you.

you don't answer. your clicking has gone slow and rhythmic. the comfort frequency. already half in stasis.