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When the little ones suggested she get the best of her old dancing wardrobe and throw together the costume of a fortune teller, Cassandra had initially thought it’d be a fun spin on her usual Halloween get-up – which was, admittedly, not much more than buying a sack’s worth of candy and putting on a witch hat whenever the doorbell was rung.

In spite of feeling a little breezy in the cold October evening and swiftly abandoned by her gaggle of sworn companions, she turned out to be quite popular among the neighborhood kids. Few could – or would – resist the show she made of looking mysteriously about an old, overturned glass bowl. She was slow and deliberate in her choice of candy to present to them, and did so with an air of utmost importance, delighting in the way they would accept it as carefully as one might a glass dish.

As the sky darkened and the evening went on, the littler ones began to be drawn back inside, and she had less and less cause for her playful routine. Still, for a while, she remained, exchanging candy with some and thanking others for their compliments of her costume. Finally, once she’d received a couple comments about being too old for this from a few of those sorts of people, she figured she’d fish the last of the candy out of her bag at last and go back inside; evidently, the folks who thought they were too good for playing a little dress-up were beginning their portion of the night.

Just as she tied her bag closed, though, she lifted her head – and just there, on the edge of the pavement as though they’d risen right out of the asphalt in the street, stood two – grown adults, from what she could tell, and watched her point-blank. And as soon as she locked eyes with one of the figures, they smiled identically uneven smiles and made their way to her bench, as though her acknowledgement had been all they’d been waiting for.

As they stepped under the light of the streetlamps, Cassandra found their smiles weren’t the only thing identical about them; in fact, she found it hard to differentiate between the two at all, with only perhaps half an inch of difference in height. They were dark cats, though spotted, with their fur clipped short and rounded at points. Entirely orderly, and, as far as she could see, woefully underdressed for the occasion.

It did not impede the apparent enthusiasm she could read out in their faces. They seemed, for a reason she couldn’t be certain of, delighted.

“Do you seek the future or fortune?” A quiet, fairly low voice came from them – one of them, Cassandra realized, was a queen, and so it took her a further moment to register that she was asking a question.

She cleared her throat – and, half-to prompt them again, asked – “Beg pardon?”

“When you look into the glass, do you watch for the broad strokes of a future?” the queen asked again, and the one next to her imitated the snapping beak of a bird with two fingers.

“Or do you pick at the thread of only a single person’s path?” He was a tom, if she was to go by the voice, but both of them were a proper enigma.

She cleared her throat again – it stung, this time – and fidgeted with the bowl and the bag, trying discreetly to get a better look at them without meeting their still-peering eyes.

“Oh, I’m not sure which way I’m supposed to do it,” she admitted – they seemed odd enough for her to wonder. It would’ve been just her luck to meet a pair of genuine fortune tellers the one day in her life she was out masquerading as one. Sheepishly, she explained – “This is just a costume, I don’t really...”

“There is no wrong way to do it,” the queen interrupted, and glanced with some restrained excitement from Cassandra to the tom, whom Cassandra thought would’ve been strange to assume was anyone other than her brother.

“No such thing as a wrong way,” he seconded – and they sounded alike, too, in an uncanny, complimentary harmony.

Cassandra raised her eyebrows and looked down at the bowl she held on her legs. The bowl, which was indeed only that, did not offer any crystal ball-worthy advice for the situation. She wondered what was behind the question; what was the difference – what did it even mean?

“I suppose I’d focus,” she guessed, carefully, and looked up at them. “Wouldn’t that be easier?”

The queen only smiled wider, and, as her brother nodded his head in that strange manner people did where they may have been better off just shaking it, she said, “Oh, no, not at all.”

“On the contrary,” the tom agreed, and Cassandra hummed in what she hoped was polite listening. They certainly took it as such, and the tom gestured with fluidity as strange as the rest of them as he explained: “To crystalize meaningfully the path of a chosen individual is grueling work.”

“You must blow away the fog of uncertainty... and pick out a reflection from the puddles it leaves behind.” The queen was nodding, now, but at least she had something to nod about, Cassandra thought. The queen brushed her hand against the tom’s with some intent and added, thoughtfully – “It is thankless.”

“Agonizing,” the tom said, and they twined their hands together without so much as looking at each other.

Cassandra chuckled – she’d expected most of the things that happened throughout the evening, but this was quickly and unequivocally taking the cake. Still, she looked at them, gazing down at her with smiles brighter than the lamplight, and felt just a little embarrassed at her whip-stitched costume and her faded bowl. “Perhaps I should go with a theme I’m better-versed in, next year.”

“No, no, it wasn’t our aim to heckle you,” the queen said quickly, and glanced at her brother, whose expression had been suddenly tinged by worry at her words.

“We don’t mean to upset. We only so rarely get to discuss this.”

“Few will listen for even the time you have,” she said to Cassandra, who, at her appreciative tone and gentle expression, felt less soothed and moreso a little touched. Suddenly, though, the queen’s expression shifted – she looked as though she had remembered something, and touched the tom’s arm with some insistence. “But we have trapped you.”

“Yes, we will go along, leave you to a lovely evening,” he agreed, covering her hand with his own before they both let go as though coordinated. As she turned, though, he stayed her decisively with a hand against her stomach, and his smile widened at her curious expression; it seemed the first time, to Cassandra, that they were not so eerily in sync. “Would you consider reading my sister’s fortune, beforehand? Since you prefer it.”

Before Cassandra could remind them that she didn’t really prefer anything of the sort, and was indeed woefully inexperienced in the field they seemed so well-versed in, the queen all but gasped in quiet joy and scratched at her own chest with short-trimmed claws.

“I’d be ever so delighted to have it read; when was the last time?” She looked at the tom for confirmation. Cassandra had, without too much surprise, apparently assumed correctly in the two being siblings. “We were nine...”

“We were nine.” The tom smiled at her, very fondly, and here his expression was quickly mirrored again. Cassandra hated to disappoint them, truly, and they seemed quite sweet, but there was not much she could offer them.

“I can make something up, if you like,” she said, a little helplessly, and tapped at the sides of the bowl idly with the tips of her claws. She stopped when the sound made them both scowl, even as they refrained from saying anything about it and fixed more pleasant expressions back onto their faces before she could react. She chuckled to herself, glanced down again; she wasn’t even doing anything yet, and apparently she was already doing it wrong. “Again, I don’t know the technicalities of this.”

To her surprise, the queen nodded eagerly, and took a step closer to the bench – just one small, restless step, followed immediately by her brother. “Yes, that is, of course, a way to do it as well.”

“No false manner of doing it, none,” he assured her, and she wondered if they did any horoscope writing in their free time. Then she felt a little mean about it. “It is through unconscious association.”

“The things your mind sees before the eyes do,” the queen said, a little dreamily, and Cassandra nodded along. No, they had to have been writing horoscopes in their free time. “You don’t have to be clairvoyant.”

Something in her expression made Cassandra feel a little too perceived. She shifted to meet the tom’s eyes instead, only to find there, predictably, exactly the same sharpness to the sensation as he seconded his sister – “Simply observant.”

Everlasting – she hoped thought-reading wasn’t a part of their repertoire. She would’ve been terribly embarrassed if they were to learn from her that they sounded like the folks that wrote horoscopes.

To be fair, clairvoyant or not, bills needed paid.

“All right, well,” she said, finally, and, with one last burst of fiddling with the bowl, she lifted it from her lap and put it on the bench beside herself, looking up at where they stood expectantly. “You could show me how to do it? And then I could try myself.”

They shifted quick, and looked between each other. Cassandra tried not to crack a smile at the clear mortification that passed between them, albeit she wasn’t sure why that was.

The queen turned first, nodding as seriously as though they’d broken some untouchable rule of etiquette. “Ah – that would be most polite.”

“Yes, we overlooked our manners again,” he said, a little as though he was already used to it and so did not overthink it; he urged his sister forward gently, touching at her back. “Tantomile would read your palm.”

Tantomile, Cassandra thought. Before she could think anything else – anything other than That’s a really nice name, or, Wow, I’ve never heard that one before, Tantomile saved them both the embarrassment with the quickness of someone more than used to it – “It is my favourite. Coricopat’s is cards.”

“And dice,” Coricopat added. The name – fit him, she supposed. He looked like a Coricopat. Perhaps because neither of them looked like anyone else. Except each other, Cassandra noted. Naturally.

”And dice,” Tantomile conceded, and gestured lightly to the space beside Cassandra. “If I may sit beside you?”

“Right, yes.” She was moving out of the way before Tantomile had finished her sentence, her smile quirking up sideways as Tantomile lifted her tail to sit down. Cassandra glanced at Coricopat, and, surely enough, found his tail raised carefully as well, even as he stood still. She hummed, “I feel like you’re better suited for this spot anyway.”

”She is,” Coricopat said for her, and, when Tantomile raised her head, they looked wordlessly between themselves for a reason Cassandra could only begin to guess. They broke their gaze together, but Coricopat’s was the first to return to Cassandra, along with his smile. His sister, with no time to waste, took Cassandra by the hand. “But this is the night to play pretend. We can hardly pretend to be that which we truly are.”

”It would be silly,” Tantomile agreed, and, after casting just one exploratory glance at Cassandra’s palm, chuckled herself. Albeit Cassandra would never have known what for, Tantomile did not seem bothered by her confusion. She only idly patted her on the wrist and she glanced up for a moment before focusing on her palm again. “See – you’re a natural, Cassandra.”

She traced gently the lines in Cassandra’s skin, and Coricopat watched closely, and they treated her as carefully as they might a statue of glass. As Cassandra laughed, the wind carried away some of her inhibition – and, among other things, even the quiet, prodding thought that she had never told them her name.

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“Oh, he just gets all sorts of things into his big dumb head,” Rumpleteazer piped up – but her voice did not cut quite so high as it could, and so her dismissiveness was hesitant, and did not convince much of anyone. She tried again, now far too loudly – “It’s ‘cause I do all the thinking for him!”

“Not true,” Mungojerrie said, or mumbled, or perhaps he stood there with a sour look to him and did not say a word at all. Nothing he could’ve said now would’ve launched them into any brand of their familiar and explosive banter – he lost all sense for it on such occasion, when he felt so small, so pitiable, and so lost.

“True!” Rumpleteazer fired back to him, and he only rolled his head to the side and let her have it.

His silence was bound to raise some sympathy for him in Demeter, who was listening to them with twitching ears. When Mungojerrie’s legs carried him all the way to the corner they’d dragged Munkustrap to, however peeved he looked by it, she’d been lingering there by him, and lingered still now.

Munkustrap’s narrowed eyes had clearly failed to discourage her – and Mungojerrie had gotten it into his head that he must’ve been no more a coward than her. And so he’d drawn gingerly closer, dragging Rumpleteazer behind himself – Rumpleteazer, who complained all the while, but never let him go so far as a step ahead of her.

“Don’t be so hard on him, Rumpleteazer,” Demeter said, with the sort of softness which most afforded kittens, and which she afforded everyone. She kept running her claws down Munkustrap’s arm, over and over, and her fingers were shaking, just a little. “I was afraid, too.”

Rumpleteazer scowled the exact way she did before saying something incorrigibly stupid, and Mungojerrie averted his eyes in favour of the ground.

“Yeah, but – all due respect, being afraid is kind of, you know, your thing?” There it was. But when Mungojerrie glanced up, as uncertainly as before, Demeter had only raised an eyebrow in mild disbelief.

But Munkustrap had turned to them, and his bright eyes were fixed on Mungojerrie.

Mungojerrie dropped his gaze back down as though struck.

Rumpleteazer didn’t let the pause sit, and for once Mungojerrie was grateful for her brashness. “And, look, when you jumped him, it did the job. When he jumped him, he just got smacked all silly. It was stupid.”

He was still grateful, he told himself.

Though it was difficult to tell himself anything now, with the shadow burnt into his sight. The single moment of Macavity’s eyes meeting his was an aching chasm. It was eating up every bit of resolve he was trying to safeguard. Every bit of repetition: that it was fine, that he did the right thing by jumping in, by trying to stand in Macavity’s way, even if it’d been for hardly anything at all.

Macavity’s eyes had been blood–shot and wild, and Mungojerrie had been afraid – was still afraid – so afraid he felt like his heart was going to jump out his throat.

He wanted to think he sought Munkustrap out to make sure he was okay. He wanted to think it was him being dutiful, or caring, or any other thing that wasn’t selfish, or lost, or afraid.

He and Rumpleteazer had spent so long proving to themselves and each other that they feared nothing; that they were faithful to their own; that they were true to themselves and each other. He did not want one look and wound from all London’s rot to undo it all in a single moment.

But he was afraid. And he ached, where the scratch was. And he wanted, desperately, kittenishly, it to be okay.

Her remark met with more silence, Rumpleteazer huffed and turned her back to the conversation entirely, meeting Mungojerrie’s shoulder with her own. She was disinterested in passivity, in being chided, in being minded. But Mungojerrie –

At the same time, Demeter shifted, and Mungojerrie glanced up to see her and Munkustrap still, looking at each other. For a moment, it seemed to him as though they were talking without words. Then Demeter bowed her head, bent herself very low – to brush her forehead against Munkustrap’s shoulder with distant loving, with idyllic reverence; and withdrew from him. Munkustrap caught her in the gesture, unslowed by any wound, and let her go just as quickly.

Then he turned his head from her and looked to Mungojerrie – so suddenly that Mungojerrie himself couldn’t so much as pretend he’d been looking only at Demeter.

But there was little to pretend for. Mungojerrie wasn’t sure what his face was doing, but it was probably something kittenish and embarrassing enough to soften Munkustrap’s expression. He felt poorly balanced atop a fence too tall, and his stomach felt as though he was already falling.

Munkustrap raised an arm for him, one and then the other, beckoning like he knew, somehow – and Mungojerrie couldn’t have played aloof if he’d wanted to. And he didn’t, particularly.

He didn’t need to reach back far; he didn’t need to so much as withdraw from Rumpleteazer’s weight against his back. Munkustrap pulled him in and she went with, as she ever did, perhaps drawn just the same by the knowledge of kindness freely offered.

There were few things so difficult to accept as kindness was, to them – and then again, they’d always pulled each other up to the challenge.

Munkustrap was warm, all the scratches and wounds pulling blood up to the surface. Even so, he didn’t seem to mind Mungojerrie burrowing himself as far as he could in his lightening fur. His smell was safety, and if he was looking down, Mungojerrie couldn’t feel his eyes.

His voice was a rumble and a purr from his chest, when it rose, along with the hand he laid atop Mungojerrie’s head – and for once, Mungojerrie did not feel treated like a kitten. Hardly anything was as reassuring as Munkustrap’s own calm, but there was recognition, too, and there was pride, and Mungojerrie squeezed his eyes shut and listened to him speak –

“Well done.”